Arte Bajo Cero

Saul Leiter

esquimal — Sat, 06 Apr 2013 21:25:33 GMT

Saul Leiter

31 January - 26 May 2013

Taxi, c. 1957
© Saul Leiter / Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

SAUL LEITER
31 January - 26 May 2013

KUNST HAUS WIEN is devoting a major retrospective to the oeuvre of the 89-year-old photographer and painter Saul Leiter. The exhibition, which was developed in cooperation with House of Photography / Deichtorhallen Hamburg, presents the wide range of this versatile artist’s works, including early black-and-white and colour photographs, fashion images, painted photographs of nudes, paintings and a number of his sketchbooks. One section of the exhibition is devoted to Saul Leiter’s most recent photographs, which he continues to take on the streets of New York’s East Village.

It is only in the last few years that Saul Leiter has received due recognition for his role as one of the pioneers of colour photography. As early as 1946, and thus well before the representatives of the so-called "new colour” photography in the 1970s, such as William Eggleston and Stephen Shore, he was one of the first to use colour photography for artistic shots, despite its being frowned upon by other artists of the day. "The older aesthetic views on the hegemony of black-and-white photography and the historical dating of the first artistic use of colour photography to the early 1970s need to be critically reviewed. Saul Leiter’s oeuvre essentially rewrites the history of photography,” comments curator Ingo Taubhorn.

In Leiter’s works, the genres of street photography, portraiture, still life, fashion photography and architectural photography coalesce. He finds his motifs, such as shop windows, passers-by, cars, signs and – time and again – umbrellas, in the direct vicinity of his apartment in New York, where he has now lived for almost 60 years. The indeterminateness of detail, the blurring of movement and reduced depth of field, the use of shadows or deliberate avoidance of the necessary light, as well as the alienation caused by photographing through windows or as reflections, all combine to create the muted colour vocabulary of a semi-real, semi-abstract urban space. These are the works of an as yet almost undiscovered modern master of colour photography.

Saul Leiter has always considered himself both a painter and a photographer. In his painting and in his photographs he clearly tends towards abstraction and two-dimensionality. One often finds large deep-black areas, produced by shadows, taking up as much as three quarters of his photographs. Passers-by are not presented as individuals, but as blurred clouds of colour, filtered through misty panes of glass or wedged in between walls of buildings and traffic signs. The boundaries between the abstract and the representational in his paintings and photographs are virtually fluid. Saul Leiter’s street photography – a genre in which his work is matchless – is, in essence, painting metamorphosed into photography.

www.kunsthauswien.at

Dominik Lang

esquimal — Sat, 06 Apr 2013 21:23:35 GMT

Dominik Lang

27 February - 21 April 2013

DOMINIK LANG
Expanded Anxiety
27 February – 21 April 2013

For his exhibition Expanded Anxiety in the Secession’s Galerie space, Czech artist Dominik Lang developed a series of works in which he reinterprets elements of Cubist sculpture and architecture. For the title installation in the back room, he reconstructs the famous statue Ùzkost [Anxiety] (1911/12) by sculptor Otto Gutfreund in an enlarged form specially adapted to the exhibition space, allowing visitors to experience the sculpture in a new way and get right inside it.

In his interventions and installations, Lang explores the complex relations between viewer and object, object and space, subjective perception and historicization. He has repeatedly dealt with Czech modernism and demonstrated his personal approach to (art) history. The new vitrine architectures and sculptures on show in the first room are typical of the kind of free, fictional dialogue that he often sets up in his work with pieces by predecessors including Josef Gočár, Vlastislav Hofmann, Pavel Janák. At the same time, he also uses this presentation to create a broader context and to prepare the (historical) mood for his installation Expanded Anxiety in the back room of the Galerie.

Expanded Anxiety is based on the statue Ùzkost ([Anxiety] 1911–12) by Czech sculptor Otto Gutfreund (1889, Dvůr Králove–1927, Prague) from the collection of the National Museum in Prague. Gutfreund studied in Paris and counts as one of the first proponents of Czech cubism. Dominik Lang: "The statue was in an expressionist-cubist style, the refracted surfaces and sharp corners emphasise the tension in the figure and its concentration and focus into the inside—in my opinion the sculpture doesn’t attempt to expand into the space and display itself, but it rather feels it wants to reduce itself into the most compressed, squeezed form.”*

Lang has reproduced Gutfreund’s 156-cm-tall statue in an enlarged form that fills the exhibition space, presented lying on its side. With respect to possible perceptions of the original sculpture, the artist creates a paradoxical situation: the monumental figure is positioned in such a way that although viewers can literally get right inside it, the "actual” outer form is not visible, accessible only to the imagination.

The artist Dominik Lang about his intention: "I attempt to create a feeling of physical tension and isolation in the viewers by enclosing them inside the sculptural shape. The aim is not to create something monumental, occupying the whole space but rather a situation where the scale has suddenly changed and visitors have a chance to walk into things and objects that they usually just look at from the outside. It is like walking into someone’s head, it is revealing the hidden centre, showing that perhaps what is important is the void inside things. Also the idea was partly to take the visitor back in time and look through the interior body of the sculpture at the past, at the atmosphere around the year 1911, in the waiting phase full of uncertainty and fear before the First World War.” *

Lang directs our attention as viewers not only to the historical work, but also to our own viewpoint. Ultimately, the viewer is faced with the question of how (historical) meaning can be constructed at all: "I would say that I am interested in how objects, and in this case artworks, are shaped, influenced, determined by their surroundings, how they are constituted by the context, historical events, their creator’s mental states, and what they say about the period and social atmosphere they were created in—are they becoming creatures with memory, victims of their times etc? (…) By physically entering the void, people will be able to go back in time and re-enter the past, as well as experiencing a specific new site for condensed anxiety, an expanded anxiety that connects the period of the early 20th century with today, reaching across to the anxiety of the present.”*

In his catalog essay, Karel Císař describes Lang’s relationship with Gutfreund and his interpretative dialog with his work: "In Gutfreund’s `Anxiety´ this idea of a vertiginous dissolution of human personality seems only being approached – whereas Lang’s Expanded Anxiety is their belated consequential fulfillment. With the single viewing perspective of his smaller-than-life sculpture of a cowering woman, Gutfreund prescribed to the viewers a liminal proximity, making them inspect the edges of the figure submerging into the physical volume of the statue as if into a rock. Lang, on the contrary, invites us into the innards of a disclosed body, metamorphosed into a corrugated cave, thus radicalizing Gutfreund’s effort to make sculpture flat – impossible to complete in a closed volume, as available to an early 20th-century sculptor – but also and primarily inducing the intended effect of vertigo and a loss of individuality, caused by the loss of optical control.

At the same time, Lang maintains his systematic interest in the physical and institutional aspects of the exhibition space, as his intervention emphasizes the gloomy subterranean atmosphere of the lower galleries of the Secession, and develops on the tradition of presenting an empty gallery. We enter the innards of Expanded Anxiety as we would enter the empty sepulcher of one’s own body.” (Karel Císař, catalogue essay)

Among others, Dominik Lang came to the attention of an international audience with his work Sleeping City in the pavilion of the Czech and Slovak Republics at the 54th Venice Biennale in 2011. This installation, in which he interprets the unknown late-modernist sculptures of his father Jiři Lang (1927–1996), brings together two artistic approaches shaped by different periods and contexts. As well as enabling an encounter with a forgotten generation, it also underlines the immanent interplay between personal engagement and distanced observation, between individual and collective memory, as well as the impossibility of facing (one’s own) history. Last year, Lang had solo shows at Kunsthaus Dresden, Galerie Krobath, Vienna, and the National Gallery in Prague. His work was also featured in the Paris Triennial at the Palais de Tokyo.

Dominik Lang, born 1980 in Prague, lives and works in Prague.

* all quotations from: Interview with Dominik Lang conducted by Annette Südbeck, catalogue, Secession 2013.

www.secession.at

Mathias Poledna

esquimal — Sat, 06 Apr 2013 21:22:28 GMT

Mathias Poledna

27 February - 21 April 2013

MATHIAS POLEDNA
27 February – 21 April 2013

Mathias Poledna deals in his work with connections between art and entertainment, modernism in architecture, fashion and design, the language of film and the history of exhibition-making, often taking the specific historicity of these phenomena as his point of departure. Most recently, he has been producing extremely concentrated cinematic installations that develop complex tensions between their subject matter and the associated references and cultural notions. The artist’s interest in different ways of expressing modernity manifests itself in the special, often highly diverse subjects in his work, ranging from post-punk music to a rain forest in Papua New Guinea, and in the aestheticism and extreme reduction of their formal idiom. Though always new and in many cases created jointly with professional collaborators, they often give the impression of found material, seeming to draw on the visual language of the collective imagination of the past and the present.

Poledna’s approach is characterized by a concise handling of cultural references and historical connections combined with elements of repetition, shifting, compression, and omission. Recurring motifs in his film works include the suggestive impact of the projected image, the tension between image and sound, and the complex interplay of popular music and cinematic language. Linking to his interest in the Institutional Critique of the 1960s and 1970s, his precise interventions in the exhibition space often place constituent and auxiliary elements of exhibiting—architecture, design, publication—at the center of his practice.

For his solo show in the Secession’s Hauptraum, Poledna has developed an installation of his film work A Village by the Sea (2011). His spatial concept takes the symmetry of the historical architecture and amplifies it by configuring the structure of the Hauptraum as an apparatus of seeing, comparable with the inside of a camera. In stark contrast to this rigorous arrangement, A Village by the Sea recalls an American musical in the style of the 1930s. For this black-and-white film shot in 35-mm, a set was built on a sound stage in Los Angeles in the style of an apartment of hotel suite interior of this period.

n a series of tracking and static shots with a classic feel, A Village by the Sea presents two characters, a woman and a man, who appear to be connected by an ambivalent, possibly romantic past. The motifs of memory, nostalgia, and lost love that reverberate in the script and in the restrained interaction of the two actors imply a world of extreme artificiality, melancholy, and sentimentality that is only broken for moments by a almost comedy-like ambiguity.

The song performed by the two characters is based on a chanson by French composer and singer Charles Trenet that was specially rewritten and arranged for this purpose as a duet in the style of the American songbook tradition. The character and instrumentation of the original were much altered, extended to an orchestral version with harp, woodwind, and brass. The piece was recorded with a 30-piece ensemble on the scoring stage at Warner Brothers, one of the few surviving recording studios from this period of the film industry. While A Village by the Sea is motivated primarily by Poledna’s interest in the American studio system during the Great Depression, the film also refers to other aspects of popular culture, including the concepts of "New” or "Intelligent” pop in early-1980s Britain, or the reception and appropriation of American film studio productions from this golden age by French film d´auteurs in the 1960s.

Mathias Poledna (born 1965 in Vienna) completed his studies at the University of Applied Arts and the University of Vienna. He has lived and worked in Los Angeles since 2000.

Poledna’s work is represented in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; New Museum, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA); MUMOK, Vienna; and the Generali Foundation, Vienna.

www.secession.at

http://artnews.org/secession/?exi=37474&Mathias_Poledna

Martin Barré

esquimal — Sat, 06 Apr 2013 21:20:29 GMT

Martin Barré

04 April - 01 June 2013

MARTIN BARRÉ
1972-1977, les années décisives
4 April - 1 June 2013

Twenty years after the artist’s death, Galerie Nathalie Obadia is honoured to be presenting a selection of Martin Barré’s works from the 1970s. Exhibited here for the first time, they show the artist returning to painting after a period of conceptual enquiry and instate the series as central to his approach.

A major figure in the history of abstraction, Barré questions the fundamental elements of painting: format, gesture, series, hanging. "I do not paint to convey moods,” he told an interviewer in 1977. "I use a rule, a rule of play, and I transgress it when the painting so requires.”*

This historical exhibition continues the rediscovery of Barré’s work undertaken by the Obadia gallery since 2006 and extends the 2010 exhibition, 91, which featured a complete series of paintings made for the first Biennale d’Art Contemporain in Lyon and the "Homage to Martin Barré” orchestrated in summer 2006 by Jean-Pierre Criqui, where Barré’s paintings were hung alongside works by painters such as Robert Mangold, On Kawara, Christian Bonnefoi, Christopher Wool, and Pascal Pinaud.

Assembling a significant selection of pieces made by Barré between 1972 and 1977, the show follows the key stages during what was a decisive period for his art, one that saw him adopt the serial approach. From now on, each painting would be generated by the same principle, relating it to the others. Each painting is like the fragment of a greater whole, part of a modular grid of which we can only see the details.

Seriality was central to Barré’s creative process as of 1972, which is when he quite literally carried out the same operations on all the canvases within a given ensemble during a succession of "sessions” – the "grid session, hatching session, covering session.” A veil of white was also applied over the surface of the canvas at the end of the gridding and hatching stages in a layering of transparencies made possible by the use of fast-drying acrylic paint.

Marking a return to painting, but also to the use of the brush, which he had abandoned in favour of the paint straight from the tube and, later, the spray can, in his effort to achieve a kind of immediacy, these series from the mid-70s (1972–1977) also evince a return to colour (given up in 1963 in favour of matt black spray paint). Initially limited to brown ("72-73"), the range of colours spread in the course of subsequent series to blue, ochres, yellow and orange, although these coloured elements were sometimes no more than traces beneath the veil of white.

A set of sixteen paintings is on show here in a linear hanging which uses the gallery spaces to follow the methodical sequence of the series, with each one having its own dedicated room: three paintings from "72-73”; four paintings from "73-74”; six paintings from "75-76” and three paintings from the final series "76-77”. As the five series unfold – one a year between 1972 and 1977 (only "74-75” does not feature in the exhibition), we can observe their increasing pictorial complexity.

The form-ground opposition recedes. The space determined by the line often seems to continue beyond the canvas. Traced in pencil using a ruler, the grid contrasts with the coloured stripes, painted freehand, as they fill different zones. In some of the pictures this covering extends over every area (75-76-D-157x145); in others it delimits the contours of a zone left empty, which is then put forward as a negative figure (75-76-A-157x145).

This play of repetitions and variations in the inscription of the hatching is redoubled by the effect due to the variations in the angle at which the grid meets the sides of the picture object. This device has its counterpart in the system determining the choice of formats, vertically extended false squares whose dimensions now appear in the titles of the works for the first time.

After the vertiginous "great emptiness” evoked by Yve-Alain Bois with regard to the tube and spray paintings of the 1960s, the paintings of the 1970s confront us with an "over-fullness,” an overdetermination that is just as disconcerting for the viewer, who is invited to "stray somewhere in the labyrinth of painting.”**

* Martin Barré, interview with Jean Clay, Macula, n° 2, 1977, p. 77-78.
** Yve-Alain Bois, Martin Barré, « La Création contemporaine » (Collection), published in 1993 by the Cnap and Flammarion, p. 72.

www.galerie-obadia.com

Louise Bourgeois

esquimal — Sat, 06 Apr 2013 21:18:27 GMT

Louise Bourgeois

23 March - 01 June 2013

Louise Bourgeois
Lair, 1986 - 2000
Lead, hanging piece
109.2 x 53.3 x 53.3 cm / 43 x 21 x 21 in

LOUISE BOURGEOIS
Rare and Important Works from a Private Collection
23 March - 1 June 2013

The Karsten Greve Gallery is pleased to present the exhibition Rare and Important Works from a Private Collection devoted entirely to Louise Bourgeois. With this event, Karsten Greve pays homage to one of the greatest artists of our time, with whom the gallery has been working for thirty years. The exhibition unveils an early period in the artist’s creation showing a great number of sculptures from the end of the 1940’s. These include old works that have rarely been exhibited and that cover an essential role in Louise Bourgeois’ production. Displaying great formal variety, the works presented bear witness to the fundamental subjects addressed by the artist throughout her long, creative and extremely rich career. The exhibited sculptures thus allow the visitor to travel through the major moments of her work, which is both constantly enigmatic and explicit at the same time.

Louise Bourgeois’ biography is an integral part of her creations. The artist’s life and her works are bound together so deeply that it is impossible to understand the one without the other. In this sense, the surface of the sculptures, just like the line of her drawings and the presence even of the installations are imbued with experiences lived in her childhood. Born into a family of ancient textile restorers, Louise Bourgeois began helping her parents in their workshop on the Boulevard Saint Germain at the age of ten. She then began her studies at the Sorbonne in mathematics, which she never completed and instead, switched to philosophy. These two paths, which are both different and convergent, were seen by the artist as two distinct paths leading to the same thing, which was the search for stability - a kind of order and perhaps even logic in her life. Though the greater part of her artistic production was produced in New York where she set up after marrying the American art historian Robert Goldwater, Paris and France remained references throughout her life. Paris was her birthplace, the city of her blossoming at the Beaux-Arts and the Ecole du Louvre, the city she left that became so distant. But France is also the country of her family nightmare, which is at the origin of all of her works, the place of trauma from which she needed to distance herself in order to survive.

The bronze sculptures, rising up straight and slender, cover an essential role in the artistic and personal story of the artist. Personnages, which is the title given to these works of her youth, were produced between 1947 and 1950. These precariously balanced streamlined monoliths became the symbol of the psychological instability the artist lived through during these years. Having left Paris for New York in 1938, it was during this period that Louise Bourgeois felt a deep nostalgia for France and the people that were close to her. Bringing together these totemic elements allows the visitor to enter the space of revocation and memory where they find themselves surrounded by personages/people as in a social context. By revoking her youth, Louise Bourgeois likewise confronts the theme of the woman-mother, which is probably at the origins of her entire œuvre. The sculptures Pregnant Woman I and II along with Woman with a Secret, produced between 1947 and 1949, are thus rare examples of the first developments of this subject that the artist subsequently deepened throughout her life. The ambivalence between man and woman, just like that between woman and mother, is a fundamental element in her works where the references to genre become blurred and uncertain.

The concept of refuge and shelter is a constant in Louise Bourgeois’ work. Seen both as a place to hide and a lair from which to exit, refuge represents a key element in the work of the artist. She develops it constantly in a formal progression that begins with Nids, (Nests) "body inhabitants” representing organic dwelling places and ends with Cellules, (Cells), which are cage-like grills reconstituting the rooms of houses. The work Lair is part of this research. It involves a lair made of lead where one is stuck and protected at the same time. The presence we sense inside, in the dark, is the symbol of the secret that is protecting itself in the house/refuge. In this sense, Lair is the example of a foreshadowed exorcism that has not yet been entirely completed and which confers a compression of emotional tension and expressive power to the work.

As of the 1990’s, aluminium began to appear in Louise Bourgeois’ work. The brilliance that is introduced by this material accentuates the aggression provoked by the sharpened contours of the works. This offers the visitor a perceptible experience that symbolises the artist’s interior state, as is the case for the piece The Mirror made in 1998. The mirror does not reflect the image of the person facing it but rather the artist’s state of mind. What we see is her intimacy, deformed, troubled and incomprehensible. By conceiving art like a guarantee of psychic health, Louise Bourgeois turns the creative process into a veritable exorcism. The artistic act becomes then the only means of pacifying and rationalising the profound wounds rooted in her personal history.

Louise Bourgeois was born on December 25th, 1911 in Paris. She was admitted to the Ecole de Beaux-Arts and frequented, among others, Fernand Léger’s studio. The artist was awarded the inaugural installation at the Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern in London in 2000. Her works are featured in the greatest collections and museums of the world, notably MOMA and the Pompidou Centre. Her works are likewise included in prestigious private collections. Throughout her career, Louise Bourgeois has obtained numerous distinctions such as the Lion d’Or received at the Venice Biennale in 1999 and the Légion d’Honneur in 2008. In 2009 she was honoured by the National Women’s Hall of Fame for having marked the history of the United States. Louise Bourgeois became an American citizen in 1951, and died in New York on May 31st, 2010 at the age of ninety-eight.

www.artnet.com/kgreve-paris.html

http://artnews.org/karstengreveparis/?exi=38024&Louise_Bourgeois

Gordon Matta-Clark

esquimal — Sat, 06 Apr 2013 21:16:26 GMT

Gordon Matta-Clark

02 April - 04 May 2013

GORDON MATTA-CLARK
Above and Below
2 April - 4 May 2013

David Zwirner is pleased to present an exhibition of late works by Gordon Matta-Clark, focusing in particular on his activities as a filmmaker. Curated by Jessamyn Fiore, the show features the artist’s explorations in subterranean New York and Paris alongside building cuts and projects involving aerial elevation. It is on view at the gallery’s 519 West 19th Street space in New York.
The exhibition begins above ground with City Slivers, Matta-Clark’s fragmented portrait of New York City from 1976. Eschewing a clear viewpoint and leaving large parts of the screen black, viewers are offered vertical cuts of bustling streets and skyscrapers interspersed with panoramas taken from atop the World Trade Center. The shifting viewing angles, sometimes shown simultaneously, seem at once celebratory and nervously laden, and contain a poignant, if perhaps subliminal, reference to the artist’s twin brother, who fell to his death from a window in their shared apartment that summer. A brief and barely legible text towards the end of the film includes the words "he just hit the pavement…face down.”
Made a year earlier, Conical Intersect was filmed in and around Matta-Clark’s iconic cut through two properties awaiting demolition next to the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris (under construction at the time). The film reveals various stages of the elaborate project, whereby a large circular shape was sliced from a heavy masonry, street-facing wall in one building, and a conical space carved out across the other side at an upward angle, piercing a small hole in the roof. The laborious digging through several layers of the buildings’ foundations was complemented two years later with Sous-sols de Paris (1977), where the camera was taken below ground to multi-level tunnels and structures long abandoned. Through minimal editing, the underground—illuminated only by handheld torches—is contrasted with brief clips from the streets above. Matta-Clark thus creates a dialogue between new and old Paris, the visible and hidden city, both light and sinister. Deep below L’Opera and Les Halles, a neatly arranged wall composed of thousands of human skulls and bone fragments dating from the days of the Revolution finds a curious match with countless wine bottles, safely stored in the cool temperatures. The film ends, perhaps appropriately, with a wine tasting.
Substrait (Underground Dailies) (1976), Matta-Clark’s underground portrait of New York, reveals a view of the American city never seen by most people.
Burial chambers underneath the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, tracks running deep below Grand Central Station, and sewage structures with underground rivers streaming through, combine to make up the urban tissue beneath the surface—vividly compared in the explanatory dialogues accompanying the film as "arteries and veins.”
Photographs and drawings accompany the films on view, documenting both the metropolitan explorations and contemporaneous projects by the artist.
Jacob’s Ladder, Matta-Clark’s ambitious project for Documenta 6 in Kassel, Germany, in 1977, originally included plans to develop an aerial dwelling site suspended some fifteen feet above ground, but ultimately took on the shape of a long woven net attached to a thirty-story-tall chimney, which brave visitors could ascend one thin batten at a time. The title of the installation was chosen by Matta-Clark for its analogy to the Old Testament story of Jacob’s dream, of a staircase connecting Heaven and Earth. By implication, it is also a reference to brotherly rivalry, as this vision occurred while he was fleeing from his brother Esau, with whom he had been fighting for inheritance. As such, the project contains perhaps another reference to the loss of artist’s twin brother a year earlier.
A series of diagrammatic sketches entitled Sky Hook (studies for a balloon building) (1978) are testaments to Matta-Clark’s idealistic interest in architecture and urban renewal. Based on vigorous research into the mechanics of ballooning, these drawings outline tent-like towers attached to large inflatable shapes. Balancing somewhere between actual proposals for flexible, economic housing networks and playful fantasies, they map out alternative spaces in defiance of existing social environments and even gravity. As such, they match one of the inspirations behind the subterranean expeditions, where the search for the "negative” spaces of the city became part of a broader interest in "mapping…lost foundations: working back into society from beneath.”
Born in New York in 1943, Gordon Matta-Clark is widely considered one of the most influential artists working in the 1970s. He was a key contributor to the activity and growth of the New York art world in SoHo from the late 1960s until his untimely death in 1978.
Since 1998, the Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark has been represented by David Zwirner, and Above and Below marks the fifth solo exhibition of the artist’s work at the gallery in New York.
In 1985, the first museum retrospective of the artist’s work was presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and traveled until 1989 to over a dozen institutions worldwide, including the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Kunsthalle Basel; Le Nouveau Musée, Villeurbanne, France; Brooklyn Museum; and the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal. Gordon Matta-Clark: You Are the Measure was the first full-scale retrospective
organized twenty years later by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, in 2007. The exhibition traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. From 2009 to 2010, Gordon Matta-Clark: Undoing Spaces toured South America to venues including the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Santiago; Museu de Arte Moderna, São Paulo; Paco Imperial, Rio de Janeiro; and Museo de Arte de Lima.
Matta-Clark’s work is represented in prominent public collections, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen, Antwerp; San Francisco Museum of Art; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. The Gordon Matta-Clark Archive is held at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal, and includes the artist’s personal correspondence, notebooks, drawings, photographs, slides, films, as well as other archival material documenting his life and work.
Above and Below is curated by Jessamyn Fiore, an independent curator and writer. In 2007, she became Director of Thisisnotashop, a not-for-profit gallery space in Dublin, which supported emerging artists. She also co-founded The Writing Workshop in 2007, which functioned as a collaborative forum for writers and artists. Fiore is co-director of the Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark with her mother Jane Crawford, Matta-Clark’s widow. She received a Masters from The National College ofArt and Design, Dublin, in 2010. In 2011, Fiore curated 112 Greene Street: The Early Years (1970–1974) at David Zwirner in New York, which led to the critically acclaimed, eponymous catalogue, published by David Zwirner and Radius Books in 2012.

www.davidzwirner.com

http://artnews.org/davidzwirner/?exi=37996&Gordon_Matta_Clark

Yael Bartana

esquimal — Sat, 06 Apr 2013 21:15:15 GMT

Yael Bartana

04 April - 04 May 2013

YAEL BARTANA
And Europe Will Be Stunned
4 April - 4 May 2013

Petzel Gallery is delighted to announce, And Europe Will Be Stunned a solo exhibition by the Israeli artist Yael Bartana. The show, consisting of her trilogy films made in Poland between 2007 and 2011, will run from April 4 through May 4, 2013, with a reception for the artist April 4 from 6 to 8pm. This will be her first exhibition with Petzel Gallery.

And Europe Will Be Stunned revolves around the activities of the Jewish Renaissance Movement in Poland (JRMiP), a utopian political group that calls for the return of 3,300,000 Jews to the land of their forefathers. The trilogy traverses a landscape scarred by the histories of competing nationalisms and militarisms, overflowing with the narratives of the Israeli settlement movement, Zionist dreams, anti-Semitism, the Holocaust and the Palestinian right of return. Apart from realizing the film trilogy, a new political movement has been established by the artist.

In the first film of the trilogy, Mary Koszmary (Nightmares) (2007), a young activist, played by Sławomir Sierakowski (founder and chief editor of Krytyka Polityczna magazine), delivers a speech in the abandoned National Stadium in Warsaw. He urges three million Jews to come back to Poland. Using the structure and sensibility of a World War II propaganda film, Mary Koszmary addresses contemporary anti-Semitism and xenophobia in Poland, the longing for the Jewish past among liberal Polish intellectuals and the Zionist dream of return to Israel.

The second film in the trilogy, 2009's Mur i wieża (Wall and Tower) was made in the Warsaw district of Muranów, where a new kibbutz was erected at actual scale and in the architectural style reminiscent of the 1930’s. This kibbutz, constructed in the center of Warsaw, was an utterly ‘exotic’ structure, even despite its perverse reflection of the history of the location, which had been the Jewish residential area before the war, and then a part of Warsaw Ghetto.

In the film Zamach (Assassination), Bartana brings the dream of multinational community and a brand new Polish society to the ultimate test. The film takes place in a not too distant future during the funeral ceremony of the leader of the Jewish Renaissance Movement in Poland, who has been killed by an unidentified assassin. It is by means of this symbolic death that the myth of the new political movement is unified — a movement which can become a concrete project to be implemented in Poland, Europe, or the Middle East in the days to come.

The combined running time of the three films is 60 minutes.  

Yael Bartana (1970, Kfar-Yehezkel, Israel) studied at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Jerusalem, the School of Visual Arts, New York and the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. Her solo exhibitions include the Moderna Museet, Malmö ; PS1/MoMA, New York; The Center for Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv; the Kunstverein Hamburg; and most recently at Secession, Vienna. In 2011, she represented Poland for the 54th edition of the Venice Biennial where the trilogy premiered. It has since been exhibited at the Louisiana Museum, Denmark; van Abbe Museum, The Netherlands; Artangel, Ikon Gallery, London; and The Tel Aviv Museum, Israel. Her artworks are included in numerous public collections, including The Museum of Modern Art in New York; The Guggenheim Museum, New York; The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Tate Modern, London and the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven.

www.petzel.com

http://artnews.org/friedrichpetzel/?exi=37936&Yael_Bartana

Zhang Xiaogang

esquimal — Sat, 06 Apr 2013 21:11:34 GMT

Zhang Xiaogang

29 March - 27 April 2013

ZHANG XIAOGANG
29 March - 27 April 2013

Pace is pleased to present a two-venue exhibition of new paintings and bronzes by Zhang Xiaogang. This is the artist’s second exhibition at Pace in New York.

Zhang Xiaogang will be on view at 508 and 510 West 25th Street, New York, from March 29 through April 27. A public reception for the artist will be held on Thursday, March 28 from 6 to 8 PM. A catalogue with an essay by Jonathan Fineberg, Gutgsell Professor of Art History and University Scholar at the University of Illinois, Urbana–Champaign, will accompany the exhibition.

The exhibition features Zhang Xiaogang’s first series of painted bronzes, which render in three dimensions the prototypical characters who inhabit his paintings. Though the sculptures are an extension of Zhang’s portraits, the figures can be classified into psychological types: youthful and idealistic. Sculpted with great clarity in a political-realist style that echoes the state-sanctioned sculptures of the Cultural Revolution, the bronzes range in size from six inches to over five feet tall.

The coolness of the sculptures is further transformed by the painted surfaces. On each sculpture, color has been painted with active brushwork, along with occasional patches reminiscent of the stains on old photographs that were first seen in the paintings of Zhang’s "Bloodline” series of the 1990s.

Painted in a completely unrealistic manner, the color is influenced by Tang glazes and the polychrome sculptures of ancient Egypt, including the sculpted head of Nefertiti. The pupils are painted dark, making the formal figures seem alive, their eyes blazing with an unexpected realism.

The exhibition also includes four new oil paintings that continue Zhang’s inquiries into the domestic interiors to which people returned after the Cultural Revolution, and in which the artist came of age. Three of the paintings contain archetypal family figures—a mother, a father, a child—representing the past and future in the limbo that is the present. A fourth painting, White Shirt and Blue Trousers (2012), combines elements of past and present, placing a traditional element of Chinese paintings—a branch of plum blossoms—alongside a light bulb, a symbol of modernity. As Fineberg writes, the painting "concerns the ‘still life’ in which memory, imagination, creative play, his cultural history, and the present may be arranged and rearranged.”

Zhang Xiaogang (b. 1958, Kunming, Yunnan Province, China) graduated from the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts, Chongqing in 1982. During the next three decades, he established himself as one of the most important Chinese contemporary painters, whose figurative works delve into the human psyche, exploring personal and collective memory in the wake of the Cultural Revolution. He has been the subject of twenty solo exhibitions, including museum shows at Gallery of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing; Hong Kong Arts Center; Today Arts Center, Beijing; and the Queensland Art Gallery, Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, Australia. He has been featured in international group exhibitions including the Guangzhou Biennial, China; International Biennial of Sao Paulo, Brazil; Venice Biennale; Gwangju Biennial, Korea; and Shanghai Biennale. His work is held in the collections of important museums worldwide, including the Essl Museum—Kunst der Gegenwart, Klosterneuburg, Austria; Dongyu Museum of Fine Arts, Shenyang, China; Fukuoka Museum of Art, Japan; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; National Gallery of Australia; Queensland Art Gallery, Australia; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California; and Shanghai Art Museum, China.

Zhang Xiaogang lives and works in Beijing. He has been represented by Pace since 2007.

www.thepacegallery.com

http://artnews.org/pace/?exi=37935&Zhang_Xiaogang

Trisha Brown

esquimal — Sat, 06 Apr 2013 21:08:35 GMT

Trisha Brown

30 March - 21 April 2013

TRISHA BROWN
Floor of the Forest
30 March - 21 April 2013

First performed in 1970 in New York City's downtown Soho neighborhood by Trisha Brown and Carmen Beuchat, "Floor of the Forest” consists of a sculptural steel frame holding up a web of ropes that have been threaded with colorful used clothing. Placed at eye-level, this horizontal plane becomes a soft platform for two dancers to negotiate. Climbing onto the apparatus, the dancers weave their way across the structure by putting on and then taking off the clothing, occasionally pausing to allow gravity to pull their bodies toward the floor while the clothing acts as a cocoon or hammock. For the three-week presentation of the work, the sculpture will be installed in the Hammer Courtyard. Dancers from the UCLA World Arts and Cultures (WAC) program will perform the piece during the installation.

Performance schedule:
Thursdays and Fridays: 1pm, 3pm, 5pm, 7pm
Saturdays and Sundays: 12pm, 2pm, 4pm
Each performance runs for 20 minutes.

The Hammer Museum will further explore Trisha Brown’s early work through a variety of free screenings on April 10, including archival performance and documentary footage that highlight the artist’s prestigious career.

"Floor of the Forest" is presented as part of Trisha Brown Dance Company: The Retrospective Project, a weeklong celebration of Trisha Brown, the most widely acclaimed choreographer to emerge from the postmodern era. Presented by the Center for the Art of Performance at UCLA, "The Retrospective Project” explores Brown’s exceptional body of work from ensemble and opera choreography to eclectic installation and site-specific works that highlight Brown’s unique and influential approach to modern dance. In a career that has spanned five decades, Brown has received countless accolades for her choreography including the National Medal of Arts, the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize, and the title of Commandeur dans L’Ordre des Arts et Lettres by the French government. She was also the first woman choreographer to receive the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship.

Trisha Brown Dance Company announced in December that while Brown will remain artistic director, she will cease choreographing new work for her world-renowned company. CAP UCLA’s Retrospective Project includes her final piece, "I am going to toss my arms, if you catch them they are yours.”

www.hammer.ucla.edu

Between Art and Politics: Hans Richter’s Germany

esquimal — Sat, 06 Apr 2013 21:07:06 GMT

Between Art and Politics: Hans Richter’s Germany

23 March - 11 August 2013

Conrad Felixmüller
Soldier in a Madhouse (Soldat im Irrenhaus), 1918
Lithograph printed in red and blue-violet on laid paper. The Robert Gore Rifkind Center for German Expressionist Studies.

BETWEEN ART AND POLITICS: HANS RICHTER’S GERMANY
23 March – 11 August 2013

This exhibition focuses on the interaction of political and aesthetic movements in Germany from the 1910s to the early 1920s, and the influence such movements had on the artistic development of Hans Richter (1888–1976); it complements Hans Richter: Encounters, on view in the Resnick Pavilion, May 5–September 2, 2013.

The works of Paul Cézanne, Franz Marc, Wassily Kandinsky, and Oskar Kokoschka exposed the young Hans Richter to the full range of contemporary art from Expressionism to abstraction. Gallerists, writers, and editors of influential cultural and political magazines introduced new artistic movements such as Futurism and Cubism to the German art world and promoted the work of aspiring artists, including Richter. World War I put a stop to this cultural activity and exchange. The exhibition also explores how Richter and many of his fellow artists became politically involved during and after the war, and how they consequently expressed in their work a yearning for a new social order, presaged by new forms of art.

www.lacma.org

http://artnews.org/lacma/?exi=37826&Between_Art_and_Politics_Hans_Richter_s_Germany