re-title.com Features

Kusseneers Gallery, Antwerp

 

 

TARTANS
Stefan Annerel

29 Jan 2009 to 14 Mar 2009

 

Shining History
Stefan Annerel's alchemy

Stefan Annerel's abstract art could actually just as well be called extremely figurative.

The motifs and the colours are fresh from reality. Or rather, from the trivial. From a plastic bag to a facecloth or a pillowcase bought in a cheap chain store. The woven pattern of the bag in which the Borgerhout (Antwerp) inhabitants-most of them immigrants-carry their laundry to the launderette. A football shirt or an indefinite piece of cloth, bought at the early market. An advertisement from a well-thumbed book or a catalogue of a do-it-yourself shop. The logo of the local night shop, designed by the owner. The cheerless sign of a suspect import/export business. Wrapping paper of an Asian supermarket.
The small marks and patterns of our time. Domestic, middle-class, second-hand, local, private. Yet as universal as the large visual footprints of globalization.

Annerel first made minute copies (i.e. painted or cut and pasted them) of these patterns, measuring 1 cm x 2 cm, which he applied on index cards. The traditional index card box was and is still a basic element for Annerel-as if it were a collection of topographic maps which together constitute his universe or his territory. His collection of Polaroids. His Atlas.
Composing the collection has taken some five or six years. All this time, this labourious drudgery seemed to serve no special aim. There was no programme, no track had been charted.

Yet there was an intermediate stage. In second-hand shops Annerel bought framed reproductions, on which he then copied his motifs and patterns. On a reproduction of Man Ray, he applied one of his own collages that had been touched up with acrylics. He called it Ray. A collage on a photograph by Hans Opdebeeck became Hans. Another collage, on a leaflet with a jeans add, became Blue Jeans.

And then some alchemy entered into the game. Instead of "immortalizing" his painted collages behind a sheet of glass, Annerel had the idea that he could just as well "solidify" them in a layer of resin. The idea was the start of a process of endless deconstruction and reconstruction, but above all, it was to become a process of magnification and a process that made created "shine".
Each of Annerel's works nowadays consists of a basis of wood and/or glass on which a first collage has been applied with strips of paper, pieces of cloth, plastic film, airbrush and acrylics. Over these, six or seven layers of resin have been applied, but between the layers the artist has continued to work with acrylics. In the evening, the artist pours hot, molten resin over the works he considers ready, which has more or less dried up in the morning, so that the works are ready for the artist to start applying paint again.
The first works that resulted from this process were relatively small (the frames from the second-hand shops), but as the artist got more control and his confidence grew, the size of the works increased. Now Annerel creates series measuring 110 cm x 140 cm, or even 125 cm x 175 cm. It would be impossible to make them larger in his workshop on the attic of his house in Borgerhout. Furthermore, with all those layers of resin and in their metal frames, the works are particularly heavy.
Banality and triviality have acquired lustre. A lustre that is hard as glass. Tangible and unmistakable, but also illusory and deceptive-that is how lustre is. Gloomy, vague images from free catalogues have been processed and turned into marvellous areas of colour that seem to come from expensive glossy magazines. The origin of the images has been hidden, their history has been wiped out and falsified.
Thus the visual simplicity, the bustle and chaos of the working-class districts will steal its way into the lofts of harbour and the villas of suburbia. Recycled, stylized, polished.

But that too, is an illusion. For if you look carefully-deep into the image-you will still see reality. There is a hair in the resin. Now there's a scrap of cloth, now there's a trace of rubbish. It's like a macroscopic image made with a telephoto lens.
Like in an apparently pitch-black surface by Rothko the yellow from five layers deeper still resonates.
Like an agitated, baroque interior by Matthias Weischer often consists of a disorientating multiplicity of soothing areas of colour.
We could just as well refer to Stefan Annerel's abstract art as extremely figurative art, because in this instance the difference between abstract and figurative seems an abstraction.

PS Stefan Annerel's work is also particularly suited to leave behind fingermarks. A shining history can easily become well-thumbed.

Danny Ilegems

Danny Ilegems is a journalist and art critic. With Mauro Pawlowski and Vincent Loozen he is the founder of the cooperative Beauty Is Your Duty, which is active on the interface between music, media and the visual arts.

Image:
Stefan Annerel, SALVATION ARMY,2008
Acrylic, adhesive tape, resin on panel and glass
140 x 110 cm
Courtesy Kusseneers Gallery, Antwerp

 

 

Kusseneers Gallery
De Burburestraat 11
2000 Antwerp
Belgium
+ 32 (0)3 257 24 00

Kusseneers Gallery

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Galerie Isabelle Gounod, Paris

 

 

Michaële-Andréa SCHATT
Paysages en ose

19 Dec 2008 - 28 Feb, 2009

 

For Michaële-Andréa Schatt, the practice of painting is a simple, direct and revealing tool. It is also a sort of a pit of silence and darkness, a space in which one can take another breath and go on breathing. Her painting emerges from the surface and at the same time tells a story from a story where shadow and obscurity, weave and go beyond representation. Michaële-Andréa Schatt paints the souvenir of landscapes by free associations, where the subject does not appear as a unity of place and an image, but like a combination or invention of disparate elements. She proceeds by a series of successive overlappings of memorial fragments. These "impressions" evoke the shadows of coats, landscapes, coat-landscapes, mental landscapes...

With these "Paysages en Ose", Michaële-Andréa Schatt conceals her tracks, and contaminates the landscape with an omnipresent pink. "Recently, I wanted to be more "daring" in painting, Rrose Sélavy. Duchamp's ritornellos "La Vie en Ose" came to mind: "We assume, we oppose, we impose, we affix, we lay down, we annoy..." Pink established itself like a challenge. In the practice of landscape, it appears beside the point, anti-natural and strikingly out of place. It gnaws and tears apart the homogeneity of a place. Space becomes proliferated, invasive, as if organic. The landscape organizes itself like a coat, an envelope or a negative body.

The exhibition introduces the artist's recent paintings of landscapes and kimonos. The kimono is at the same time a simple garment, but one, which does not reveal its full complexity at first sight. This garment, located between an intermediate space between a second and third dimension, folds and unfolds like an origami.

Michaële-Andréa Schatt develops a body of paintings where her technical procedures induce a reversal, inversions, gaps, the fragmentation of images. The totalities of her works, along with her ceramic pieces, weave the three axes of landscape, body and textile....

 

Michaële-Andréa Schatt

was born in 1958 in Saint-Germain-en-Laye. She lives and works in Montreuil-sous-Bois.
Her work has been exhibited at the Fine Arts Museum and the Museum of Ceramics in Rouen (2007), the Vallauris Biennial (2008), CREDAC, Manufacture des Oeillets -Ivry, CRAC Montbéliard, Galerie Municipale Julio Gonzales - Arcueil, Fondation COPRIM - Paris, Réunion de Musées Nationaux, Maison de la Faïence - Desvres, Centre Rhénan d'Art Contemporain, Châteauroux Biennial, l'Art dans les Chapelles... and has appeared in many contemporary art fairs including Artissima, Miami (Galerie Egelünd), FIAC (Galerie Bernard Zürcher, Galerie Jean Fournier)... Her work has been exhibited in the USA, Germany, Denmark, Luxemburg, Switzerland, Italy...

Her work can be found in the collections of the Fine Arts Museum and the Museum of Ceramics in Rouen, the Fond National d'Art Contemporain, FRAC Ile de France, FRAC Franche Comté, Banque Nationale de Paris (France - USA), Musée de Céret - France, Le Bon Marché as well as in private collections throughout Europe and the USA.

 

 

Image:
Michaële-Andréa Schatt
Paysage en ose 1, 2008, mixed technic on canvas, 185 x 240 cm
Courtesy of Galerie Isabelle Gounod

 

Galerie Isabelle Gounod
13 rue Chapon
75003 Paris
France

+33 (0)1 48 04 04 80

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BELLWETHER, New York

 

 

ALYSSA PHEOBUS
LAY IN THE REINS

January 22 - February 21, 2009

BELLWETHER is pleased to announce Alyssa Pheobus's first solo show, LAY IN THE REINS. The exhibition features a group of large-scale text drawings that excavate the lyrics of love songs and other fragments of language through an elaborate process of performative inscription. Positioning her disciplined and labor-intensive drawing practice as an analog to other subjective performances of text, Pheobus both "covers" and "samples" in an attempt to engage her source material critically and libidinally.

Many of the texts that Pheobus "performs" through drawing are stirred by a fascination with the threatening eroticism of violent sexuality. They also mark intersections between the language of aggressive desire and the hyperbolically "masculine." Juxtaposed with escape fantasies in which acts of abandonment become expressions of agency, these themes remain carefully contained within a system that imagines both the limits of language and the experience of desire as prison-like. The perpetual chafing against captivity that is a palpable subject in Pheobus's work is mirrored by her drawing practice, which is at once restrained and workmanlike, compulsive and devotional.

The tactile surfaces of Pheobus's drawings, composed on cobbled-together sheets of handmade cotton rag paper, are incised with stitch-like graphite characters that form the building blocks for an austere visual language. This idiosyncratic graphic vocabulary simultaneously evokes instruments of confinement-barbed wire, cells, cages, nets, straps-and the psychic calendar of tally marks scratched upon a wall.

A native of Maryland, Alyssa Pheobus received her MFA from Columbia University in 2008. Her work has recently been featured in group exhibitions at Tracy Williams, Ltd., Exit Art, and Dieu Donné in New York. Pheobus lives and works in Brooklyn.

Alyssa Pheobus
Harder, Harder
72 x 53 inches, Graphite on cotton rag paper, 2008
© Alyssa Pheobus 
Courtesy of BELLWETHER, New York

BELLWETHER
134 Tenth Avenue
(between 18th and 19th Streets)
New York, NY 10011

+1 212-929-5959

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Chung King Project, Los Angeles

 

Marius Bercea, "Time Will Tell"

 

Jan. 17th - Feb. 21st, 2009

Chung King Project is delighted to present "Time Will Tell", a series of new work by Marius Bercea. The young Romanian painter who currently lives and works in the city of his birth, Cluj-Napoca (capital city of the province of Transylvania), caught the European art world's imagination with his series of vivacious, Naples-yellow paintings whose subjects derive from what the artist describes as an 'intensely personal archive'. Like these earlier paintings, this current body of work owes its genesis to images sourced from family photographs, newspaper clippings and personal memories of growing up. Yet, unlike the earlier paintings that succeeded in evoking the happiness found in the kind of simple moments of childhood pleasure that transcend geographical and political boundaries and provoke nostalgia among adults everywhere: fondly remembered games, school trips and public holidays, Bercea's new works tend instead towards the engendering of unease and discomfort. We are presented with dreams that will never be realised, hopes that have failed to be fulfilled and scenes such as abandoned amusement parks once intended for children that have become the haunts of the disturbed, the lonely and the dispossessed.

Yet while Bercea's earlier works may have seemed to be all sunshine on initial reading, as the series evolved, they began to provoke some sinister questions of their own: Why was the sky always that peculiar shade of yellow - and why everything so brilliantly, acidly illuminated? The answer is far from innocent - Romania borders the Ukraine and many people in Romania believe the yellow cloud that accompanied the Chernobyl disaster impacted far more on the health of their youngsters than was 'officially' allowed to be communicated to them.

Bercea began his journey into the exploration of the familial archive by questioning the authenticity of the perfect sunlit childhood memory that the photograph boasts of and the painting (invested with a chromatic register inspired by a nuclear fall out) can claim to be a lie. In this new body of work he presents at Chung King, he refuses to give us an easy time - it's not possible to simply look fondly on the scenes he presents to us - but we can wonder at how Bercea succeeds in breathing pathos and beauty into the banality of the lives he draws for us, at how he elicits tenderness from us for his subjects; and at his brave decision (demonstrated with often determinedly sketchy brushwork), to refuse to prettify or polish his paintings - instead leaving them raw, edgy and somehow fittingly naive.

Marius Bercea was born in 1979 and has already widely shown in various places in Europe, including Plan B, Cluj, and Eleven Fine Art, London. This exhibition will be his first in the United States.

 

Image:

Marius Bercea
Black Seas Heights, 2008
Oil on canvas, 220 x 160 cm
Courtesy of Chung King Project, Los Angeles
 

Chung King Project
945 Chung King Road
Los Angeles, CA 90012
+1 323 933 4746

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KLEMM'S, Berlin

 

Alon Levin
Postponed Modernism

9 January - 14 February 2009

Alon Levin (New York/Den Haag) makes large-scale installations often made of wooden structures that refer to the systems of thinking we tend to take for granted. Philosophical, economical, and social theories of progress and growth, organizing principles, and ideas of modernist utopias are some of the recurring themes in his work. Levin examines the images, metaphors, and symbols that represent these concepts, and explores the contradictions and failings of their systems. The work can be seen as a narration about the buildup, breakdown, and possibly the reinvention of meaning itself.

Levin's method and aesthetic approach: in the beginning he establishes parameters and a course of action; then a process starts in which he reacts to, examines, and eventually playfully breaks these same parameters. Alon Levin develops modules of what appear to be color and image systems that are prevalent throughout his work. Basic forms like tower, spiral, arch and wheel continuously reoccur - all bearing the connotations of technical progress, movement and monumentality. The installations' overwhelming physical presence and the spatial quality they force onto the viewer establish a kind of logic that transforms the context and creates a momentary alternative reality. The structures have a material rawness and this underlines the transparency of the process and sketch-like nature of the installations.

In Postponed Modernism Alon Levin continues his ongoing series (ISCP, New York 2008 / STROOM, Den Haag 2008/ HVCCA, New York 2009) addressing Man's adoration for - and creation of - symbols, both in the tradition of Mythology as well as in the machinery of Nationalism.

In the center of the exhibition will be a colossal 'construction' that allows associations to the 'Great Wheel' of early world fairs, a hamster wheel, or perhaps an indoctrinating baby-mobile. The mechanical construction of the installation is self-evident, though it defies any clear purpose. This highly chromatic work, "Untitled, A Proposal for a Universe Under Control" will stand beside the massive black and white wall-construction, "A Large Inverted Standard Brain on the Wall". The imposing presence of these works is not there to celebrate any truth or man's achievement but rather confronts the viewer with the limitations of the 'box' it is in.

Postponed Modernism is the first solo exhibition of Alon Levin in Germany.

 

This exhibition was supported by: Koninkrijk der Nederlanden und Fonds BKVB.
 

 

Image:
Alon Levin, Untitled, A Proposal for a Universe Under Control, 2008
Holz, Öl auf Holzplatte, Alkyd auf Holzplatte
390 x 390 x 500 cm
Courtesy of KLEMM'S, Berlin

KLEMM'S
Brunnenstraße 7
10119 Berlin
+49.30.40 50 49 53

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Monika Sprüth Philomene Magers, London

 

PETER FISCHLI / DAVID WEISS
'Objects on Pedestals'

 

30 January - 28 February 2009

 

Sprüth Magers London is delighted to present 'Objects on Pedestals', a survey of sculpture works by acclaimed Swiss artists Peter Fischli and David Weiss. The exhibition includes a selection from the series 'Rubber Sculptures' (1986 - 1988), which comprises a number of life-size black rubber casts of ordinary and commonplace objects, including a chest of drawers, a table, a candle and a cutlery tray. The exhibition also features a number of sculptures, all made in 2007 in unfired clay, which also depict normal and quotidian objects, such as a shoe or a jug, although on an exaggerated scale. Together, these two bodies of work reveal the artists' ongoing fascination with the banal and absurd qualities of the everyday, and the materiality and tactility of mass consumption.

Infused with Fischli & Weiss's characteristic wit and knowing irony, 'Rubber Sculptures' and the clay sculptures prompt intriguing questions about the form and function of the objects that facilitate modern living. The heavy black vulcanite rubber invokes a range of associations which sits at odds with the practical uses of the objects assembled, requiring the viewer to look askance at the everyday things that are on view. Industrial, durable, even kinky, the black rubber material gives the forms of these mundane items a disconcerting and fetishised quality, as plain and commonplace things bounce and bend in a way which ill suits their function or purpose, and are installed and scrutinised in the gallery space. As the objects are divested of any recognised utility, they become charged with an aesthetic and sensory resonance which, both through the anonymising effect of the black colouration, and the simultaneously seductive and repulsive tactile quality of the rubber, presents a disquieting and intriguing image of the domestic world.

The clay sculptures also featured in the exhibition similarly invite the viewer to re-examine the material culture of contemporary life. Like 'Rubber Sculptures', the material used to create the sculptures assembled offers the opportunity for an ironic gaze at the objects represented. By recreating out of delicate, fragile and crumbling clay a number of objects, such as an axe or a chain, which demand to be robust and resilient in order to be of any use, the items on view again establish a purely formal relationship with the viewer. The artists' practice of elevating useless objects into art is further heightened by the exaggerated scale of the sculptures. A clay shoe 52 cm in length cannot be worn, but can be venerated in a gallery context, as an icon of everyday life.

'Rubber Sculptures' and the clay sculptures build on a number of earlier works by Fischli & Weiss which exploited and explored the unnerving and amusing effects of using materials in incongruous ways. Their earliest collaboration, 'Wurstserie' (1979), comprised a series of photographs featuring dramatic, funny and distressing scenarios played out by sausages, cigarette butts and other sundries. These sculptures also exemplify the ethnographic scrutiny of the everyday that has animated the practice of Fischli and Weiss, in a wide array of different media, for almost three decades. From 'Sichtbare Welt' (1987-2000), their monumental archive of nearly 3,000 photographs of commonly observed objects and scenes, to their most recent work, a comprehensive and endlessly suggestive collection of 800 print advertisements entitled 'Sonne, Mond und Sterne', which is on view at Sprüth Magers Berlin until 31 January 2009, the art of Fischli and Weiss has continually been exercised by the myriad meanings that might be located in the ordinary world around us.

Both born in Zürich, Peter Fischli (1952) and David Weiss (1946) met in 1977 and began their artistic collaboration shortly after, in 1979. Their artwork has been the subject of many prominent solo exhibitions around the world including recent retrospectives at the Deichtorhallen, Hamburg (2008), Kunsthaus, Zürich (2007) and Tate Modern, London (2006). In 2003, they represented Switzerland at the Venice Biennale for the third time.

© Peter Fischli / David Weiss
Platte, 1988, Black Rubber, Diameter 30cm
Courtesy of Monika Sprüth Philomene Magers Berlin London

Monika Sprüth Philomene Magers London
7A Grafton Street
London W1S 4EJ
+44 (0) 207 4081613

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Standpoint Gallery, London

 

Will Cruickshank, Thomas Haywood, Ulrike Mohr
Survey

January 16 - February 14 2009

Survey- to examine carefully and thoroughly, and record (in unconventional ways but in particular detail) the features and conditions of (a building) (an area of land) (a sequence of thoughts) (a group of people) (a relation between objects) (what happens next...)

Will Cruickshank makes insouciant objects that react to the viewer with a deep, deadpan comedy. They are faux-scientific experiments in weight, movement, balance and human activity. A shopping basket of pansies, greeting you at the entrance to his 2007 Coleman Projects exhibition, slides up out of reach as you approach - connected by a system of pulleys that stretch up over the roof of the 3-storey building, to a mirror-object in the back yard. Cruickshank is an inventor-artist in the mould of Panamarenko, but responsive to environment and context, and with a generous sense of the absurd. Cruickshank's site-specific activities include converting a broken bicycle into a mobile free hot-chocolate stall in Zhongdian, Yunnan, China. For Standpoint, he will welcome visitors into the building with a tune.

Will Cruickshank's projects and performances include Columbo at Coleman Projects, London and Wheelbarrow Piano, Pallas Contemporary Projects, Dublin, Ireland in 2008; solo show The Shampoo at Studio 1.1, London, and residency at Golden Dragon Street Studios, Zhongdian, Yunnan, China in 2007.

Thomas Haywood's 'Family' is a photographic body of work that has been developing over the last five years, exploring the nature of family relations, associations with place, and ideas of belonging. Although Haywood has never lived in Denmark, his mother is Danish, and throughout his life he has visited often. The series builds a visual affinity with images that are familiar but dislocating. One image has only a tangential relation to the next, but taken together they imply a familiar, damp rural expanse of waiting and looking, with people nearby if not in the frame. This 'knowledge' emerges as much from Haywood's aesthetic debt to the semi-rural surburbia of film and television as it does to the viewer's personal memories. As in the series 'Island" (RCA 2008), Haywood's technique aspires to visual containment of a milieu - the understanding that comes from viewing a thing from all different angles, over and over again.

Thomas Haywood graduated MA RCA photography in 2008, and was awarded the Photographers' Gallery Prize for photography. His series 'Island,' was featured in Source Magazine, Issue 55.

In Measures at Normal Null, Ulrike Mohr calculated the highest and deepest publicly accessible places in Berlin, and redefined the median as Normal Null (the usual orientation being sea level), thus rendering a large part of the city into the negative, minus zone. Mohr's concentration on systems of position location refer as much to sociology as geography - what is my position in this system; what is my place in the ranking, provided I appear there at all; where are the gaps in my network; am I inside or outside again? For the 5th Berlin Biennial, Mohr relocated several scrubby, self-seeded trees from the roof of the the Palast der Republic (former GDR parliament building) to the Neue Nationalgalerie, but this proved (metaphorically, if not aesthetically satisfactorily) impossible; the trees were replanted in the Skulpturenpark and represented by wall-drawings in the gallery space. Working with materials sourced from the local environment, Mohr will be making a new conceptual installation piece for Standpoint.

Ulrike Mohr's recent projects include solo shows at Cluster Gallery, Berlin, and a public art project at Kunsthaus Kloster Gravehorst, as well as featuring in When things cast no shadow - the 5th Berlin Biennial (all 2008); her solo show Definitionen was at Kunstverein Hildesheim in 2007.

 

 

Image:
Ulrike Mohr
Restgrün 2006

(transplanting trees from the roof of the GDR building in Berlin)
C Print
Courtesy of the artist and Standpoint Gallery, London

 

 

Standpoint Gallery
45 Coronet Street
London N1 6HD
+44 207 739 4921

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Mary Mary, Glasgow

 

Karla Black

 

10 January - 14 February 2009

 

For her second solo exhibition at the gallery, Glasgow based artist Karla Black will spend six days working on-site to produce a group of sculptures made from materials such as body moisturising creams, chalk dust, cotton wool, sellotape, vaseline, paint and egg shells.

Black describes her works as, "almost painting, performance or installation while actually, and quite definitely, being sculpture". These sculptures and their titles, form a struggle between material experience and language, where the former wins first priority. They are rooted in Kleinian psychoanalysis: direct, behavioural connections to the physical world that hold a tangible knowledge impossible to equal in words but still partially, while certainly inadequately, translatable. Words are important here when used in their rightful, secondary place, where the conscious mind enters the work, after the unconscious has already created the bulk of its physicality.

There is a combination of different categories of materials that have often been perceived as male and female. The traditional art-making material sit alongside and merge with more domestic, bodily or personal materials, such as make-up, toiletries, and cleaning products.

In addition the work is caught between thoughtless gesture and an obsessive attempt at beauty. Karla Black describes her sculptures as being both compromises and protests at the same time. It is a frustration that what the work wants to be is actually impossible in reality. There is a wish for a totally natural occurrence, or a person's physical encounter with nature; for the work to seem to have made itself and then hover unsupported in the ether: pure raw material, colour and sensation.

A paragraph taken from 'The Waves' by Virginia Wolf, in which the thoughts of the character Bernard are laid out, says something about the position from which these sculptures are made:
'How tired I am of stories, how tired I am of phrases that come down beautifully with all their feet on the ground! Also, how I distrust neat designs of life that are drawn upon half-sheets of notepaper. I begin to long for some little language such as lovers use, broken words, inarticulate words, like the shuffling of feet on the pavement. I begin to seek some design more in accordance with those moments of humiliation and triumph that come now and then undeniably. Lying in a ditch on a stormy day, when it has been raining, then enormous clouds come marching over the sky, tattered clouds, wisps of cloud. What delights me then is the confusion, the height, the indifference and the fury. Great clouds always changing , and movement; something sulphurous and sinister, bowled up, helter-skelter; towering, trailing, broken off, lost, and I forgotten, minute, in a ditch.'

Born in 1972, Karla Black's recent exhibitions include solos at West London Projects, London; Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne and group exhibitions Wollust-the presence of absence, Columbus Art Foundation, Leipzig; Strange Solution, Art Now, Tate Britain, London (all 2008). Forthcoming projects include solo exhibitions at Migros Museum, Zurich; Modern Art Oxford and Inverleith House, Edinburgh and Karla Black.

Image:
Karla Black, Mary Mary, Glasgow January 2009

Mary Mary
Suite 2/1
6 Dixon Street
Glasgow G1 4AX
+44 (0) 141 226 2257

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Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art, Peekskill, New York

 

Karen Sargsyan

"Abroad Understanding"

HVCCA Artist-in-Residence Fall 2008

 

Exhibition Opening Sunday February 8th, 2009
Gallery talk 4:00pm with reception to follow

The Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art is pleased to announce the exhibition opening of the museum's Artist-in-Residence, Karen Sargsyan, on Sunday February 8th, 2009.  There will be a gallery talk at 4:00 pm with a reception to follow.  Sargsyan is an Armenian artist residing in Holland and the recipient of the prestigious 2008 Thieme Award for the most promising new artist.  He is known for creating elaborate figurative installations using paper.  The artist began a three-month residency in October 2008, during which he has worked at the Hat Factory in Peekskill to produce his new installation "Abroad Understanding" for HVCCA's mezzanine gallery.

"Abroad Understanding" Is a room size installation that tells the story of an overthrown king.  Like actors on a theater's stage, Sargsyan's life-size figurative sculptures depict a theatrical scene of politics and power.  The paper figures are symbolically arranged in contorted poses, highly suggestive of dance movements frozen in time and reminiscent of classic Baroque sculpture and dramatic gestures to provide energy and movement to a work.  In the center of the installation sits an anonymous King on the floor, leaning up against his throne, dying, flanked by his once loyal and devoted subjects. The clothes hang in layers around their bodies, appear frayed, and eaten away.  They might be costumes from long-gone ages, with puffy balloon trousers and sleeves, high rolled collars, head ornaments, frilled skirts, capes and loose, draped pieces of fabric.  The images are part of a broader narrative in which the expressions stamped on the faces of the participants emote feelings of pain, of bacchanalian delight, of ecstasy.  The viewer is drawn not so much into the narrative as into the pathos of the interrelationships as well as the solitariness of the human condition.  

For Sargsyan, this existentialist search for the true and good core of humanity is fundamental, and god and man (the large and small figures) are two sides of the same coin.  "I look at the influences that affect people the same way that I look at a theatrical production," says Sargsyan.  "I want my work to reflect this play or game, but I also want to show the reduction and the purification.  My work is not a static image.  It shows an active process that expresses this 'cleaning up' My installations are a play in which the protagonists try to wipe 'the factories' off the playing field, as if the protagonists were holy beings in a theatrical production."

Karen Sargsyan was born in Yerevan, Armenia in 1973 and currently lives and works in Amsterdam. He studied at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten/Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science, Amsterdam, NL in 2006-2007 and Atelier Winston Huisman, Arnhem, NL in 1999-2001. In 2007 he received the Thieme Art Award and a fellowship with the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs/DCO/IC, NL in 2006. Recent 2008 solo exhibitions include 'The Theory of Art', Buro Leeuwarden, Leeuwarden, NL, and Suzie Q Projects, Bob van Orsow Gallery, Zurich, SW. Upcoming 2009 exhibitions include a group exhibition at The Museum of Arts and Design, New York and 'Stressed Shelter' at KW14, s-Hertogenbosch, Netherlands. Karen is represented by Galerie Juliètte Jongma in Amsterdam.

This exhibition was made possible by generous support from The Netherlands Foundation for Visual Arts, Design and Architecture (Fonds BKVB).

Image:
Karen Sargsyan: Abroad Understanding (detail of work in process), 2008
Metal, paper, wood, 98 x 248 x 224"
Courtesy of the Artist. 
 
 
HUDSON VALLEY CENTER FOR CONTEMPORARY ART
1701 Main Street PO Box 209
Peekskill, New York 10566
+1 914.788.0100

 

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Nadania Idriss New Glass Art & Photography, Berlin

 

Simone Neidhard
Lyrics in Glass

24 Jan 2009 to 28 Feb 2009

 

Nadania Idriss New Glass Art & Photography is pleased to present Lyrics in Glass, a solo exhibition featuring the work by Simone Neidhard. Lyrics in glass is a composition of fragile, lyrical prose uniting one object to the next in a poetic manner.
 
Simone Neidhard brilliantly uses glass as a substrate for reciting the narrative.  Traditional symbols are reduced and juxtaposed so that the viewer cannot decode the meaning, yet has an instinctive understanding of the experience.  "Mondrian Melting" stirs up a well-known image, while at the same time playing with the characteristics of glass, a material that is both transparent but able to fill an empty space.  Like many of the installations in Lyrics in Glass, "Katharsis" is significantly reduced to symbols, but tells a story of injury and healing through soft, fragmented words. 
 
Born in Münster, Germany, Simone Neidhard studied philosophy and Russian Literature at the Freie University in Berlin.  Between 1989 and 1995, she studied art at the Hochschule für Angewandte Kunst in Vienna and the Kunsthochschule Berlin-Weißensee. Simone spent a year in Salamanca, Spain and was rewarded the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) scholarship to study in Mexico.  Today, Simone Neidhard lives and works in Freiberg, Germany.

 

 

Image:
Simone Neidhard

Detail of Oktopus & Mistel
Courtesy of Nadania Idriss New Glass Art & Photography

 

Nadania Idriss
New Glass Art & Photography
Linienstr. 154
10115 Berlin

Nadania Idriss New Glass Art & Photography

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