re-title.com Features

BERNHARD KNAUS FINE ART, Frankfurt

Ingo Meller
2010/24
Oil on canvas
190,3 x 144,9cm
Courtesy of Bernhard Knaus Fine Art, Frankfurt
 
 
Callum Innes, Ingo Meller, Wilhelm Mundt, Robert Zandvliet, Rémy Zaugg
 
Opening May 04, 2012, 7 pm
until 28 July, 2012
 
What is painting supposed to mean when it will not serve as artistic tool to create fanciful imagery, how can artists use painting as a media to create new artistic ideas, how does painting become investigative to perception?
 
Five artist and five different artistic positions give answers, each in his way to these questions:
demanding, ambivalent, radical, provocative.
 
Callum Innes, born 1962 in Edinburgh, Scotland, lives and works in Edinburgh
Wilhelm Mundt, born 1959 in Grevenbroich, Germany, lives and works in Cologne
Ingo Meller, born 1955 in Cologne, lives and works in Berlin
Robert Zandvliet, born 1970 Terband, The Netherlands, lives and works in Rotterdam
Rémy Zaugg, born 1943 in Courgenay, Switzerland, died 2005 in Basel
 
"I still see myself as being an inherently figurative artist, whether that figuration is to do with how I approach the making of a painting or its physicality, how a painting reacts to you, what you bring to it".
Callum Innes
 
"My aim is to create something that will be immediately identifiable as art because of the way in which
it manifests itself to our senses as a picture. At the same time, my work is made up of oil paint, canvas and the application of colour - as material substance it can be traced back to things with which everyone is familiar. I see my painting as the interplay between meaning and its frustration. This straightforward, universal approach remains the central constant in my work."
Ingo Meller
 
"I'm interested in the figurative as well as the abstract, but the turning point between the two interests me the most. That's what I keep going back to."
Robert Zandvliet
 
"To keep up a perceptive relationship to the world, to develop and to question it, is very exhausting. It is a thankless task to be newly accomplished over and over again, and you have to accept, that there is no ending. It is a work, that never will be finished."
Rémy Zaugg
 
 
BERNHARD KNAUS FINE ART
Niddastrasse 84, 1st Floor
60329 Frankfurt
Germany
T: + 49 (0)69 244 507 68
 
BERNHARD KNAUS FINE ART
 
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DOMOBAAL, London

Christopher Hanlon
Back
37×26cm/14.5×10.2in, 2012
oil on linen stretched over board
Courtesy of Domo Baal, London
 
 
CHRISTOPHER HANLON
DISSEMINATUS

27.04.12 - 02.06.12
PRIVATE VIEW FRIDAY 27 APRIL 2012 6-8PM
 
Mushrooms are essential - without them ground is not fertile and plants don't grow. Mushrooms are ephemeral - some species even grow over night silently and unseen only to disappear the next day in the rain. The Fairy Inkcap Coprinus Disseminatus, sometimes called the Trouping Inkcap or Trooping Crumble Cap, is a species that forms dense masses on rotting tree stumps and roots. These gregarious little fungi occur from early spring until the onset of winter, and they are at their most spectacular when the caps are young and pale - sometimes nearly pure white. It takes just two or three days for young white caps to turn grey and then begin blackening. Dessiminati will then scatter and broadcast their spores as delicately, mysteriously and as widely as possible, spreading spores almost like a rumour which gets more and more distorted as it circulates until its origin becomes unknowable and untraceable. A spore is a reproductive structure produced by certain fungi, plants (moss, ferns), and some bacteria. Spores are specially adapted for dispersal and surviving for extended periods of time in unfavourable conditions. They are capable of developing into new life without fusion with another reproductive cell. The spore print is black. Their odour and taste is not distinctive and their preferred habitat is on and beside stumps and rotting wood.
 
Domo Baal is delighted to present Christopher Hanlon’s second solo exhibition in the gallery, a body of new paintings made over the past two years. In common with the Fairy Inkap Coprinus Disseminatus (a subject to which Hanlon has returned at regular intervals in his paintings) the artist’s preferred support is organic matter - most usually linen stretched over wooden board - which has served a previous function and is found in a state of disuse, now ready to provide the breeding ground for a new and unfamiliar life-form. Previous solo exhibitions include domobaal gallery (2009) and Timothy Taylor Gallery (2010), group shows include New Contemporaries (2007), Galerie Chez Valentin, Paris (2009) and The Renaissance Society, Chicago (2009).
 
 
DOMOBAAL
3 John Street
London WC1N 2ES
T: 0044 2072429604
 
DOMOBAAL
 
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MAERZ CONTEMPORARY, Berlin

ADRIAN NAVARRO
Loop 02, 2012
Oil, acrylic and digital printing on canvas
185 x 232 cm
Courtesy of MAERZ CONTEMPORARY, Berlin
 
 
ADRIAN NAVARRO
REFLECTIONS
 
27 AprIl - 15 June 2012
 
The Spanish artist Adrian Navarro will open his solo exhibition in the Berlin gallery Maerz Contemporary this week-end, with a private reception Friday April 27th at 6pm. The exhibition will be on until June 15th.
 
The Ground is the Figure is the Ground
 
These large scale paintings, part of the two series Rings and Loops, are reflections in its two meanings —i.e., mental and optic or physical. Adrian Navarro puts in front of us a clear equivocation of figure and ground. The classic geometries of ring and helix are carved as reliefs with precise ambivalence —sometimes the circular holes are opaque, sometimes transparent— revealing their painted matter. These volumes are intermittently altering their own figure-ground revealing technique: they are themselves defined against a veiled ground of formless paint; the ring is self-contained, whereas the loop is an open-ended figure cropped by the frame of the canvas; both contain figures within them, and are the ground to their own figures as well. Yes, it’s complicated.
 
What Navarro is presenting here is the Battle of the Paintings that has been taking place at his studio for the last half decade, three centuries after The Battle of the Books at the King’s Library —both in London. What Jonathan Swift satirized in 1704, was the quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns. The beehive and the spiderweb were the metaphors of that day. Today, the battle is that between: abstraction and figuration, craft and design, the eye and the hand, movement and confinement, and ultimately between totality and infinity. The work of Emmanuel Levinas of 1969 (Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority) finds in these series —and in the gallery as battleground— its best pictorial equivalent.
 
This is thus the space of epic, of heroic confrontation, but it is not a narrative space. The variations within the series speak of self-absorbed movement: by using the language of that which was accused to kill painting —i.e., photography— Navarro is rhyming the works of Muybridge and Marey in the series. They present the endless rotation of the struggle between opposites, a messianic synthesis about to happen —anticlimactic epic painting.
 
Eduardo Vivanco. Yale University.
 
 
MAERZ CONTEMPORARY
Weimarer Str. 16
D - 10625 Berlin
Germany
T: +49 (0)30 60940015
 
MAERZ CONTEMPORARY
 
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FRANCOIS GHEBALY, Los Angeles

MARIUS BERCEA
Imperfect Pearls Shimmer at Dusk, 2012
Oil on Canvas
112 x 152 in. / 285 x 385 cm
Courtesy of Francois Ghebaly, Los Angeles
 
 
MARIUS BERCEA
Concrete Gardens
 
April 14 - May 26,  2012
 
The city square is deserted. There’s no one strolling past the columns of the former municipal building, no one on the bandstand. The heat that pulsates on the canvas is keeping everybody at home in this languid summer evening. The modernist pyramid, vaguely redolent of Le Corbusier and Oscar Niemeyer, is a monumental relic of the failed utopias of the 20th century. Imperfect Pearls Shimmer at Dusk (2011) could be in any nondescript ex-USSR city. Although Marius Bercea does not specify the location, the artist is clearly picturing a place lived in, used by its invisible inhabitants to the point of exhaustion. The three diving statues invite the eye to the vast sand expanse, absurdly tropical with its exotic flowers and white promotional umbrellas. There’s a distinct yearning for escape from this place saturated with memories — fed 24/7 by the lurid billboards gleaming on the horizon.
 
Bercea belongs to the generation of Romanians who grew up under Ceausescu’s regime, and saw their country’s rapid transformation after the dissolution of the Communist Bloc. In some of his earlier paintings, the artist tackled real and imagined childhood recollections: the formulaic school photographs, games, and picnics of faceless kids, wrapped in the yellowish, noxious air that hung over Eastern Europe after Chernobyl’s nuclear disaster. With this new series, described by the artist as a “collective urban portrait,” Bercea deals with what happened immediately after 1989, with the arrival of Western capitalism; neon slowly taking over the cityscape, its fluorescent hues slapped on the decaying concrete, the shifting sense of what is normal, what should be aspired to, and how it could, or should, be obtained. Although it eschews direct narratives, Imperfect Pearls Shimmer at Dusk evinces a sense of being in flux. Advertising blurs progressively emerge from the brushstrokes’ rich interlays; Romania’s transition is happening on the canvas under our eyes.
 
Bercea bathes his built-up environments in the suspended atmosphere of twilight: dawn of an era, dusk of another. He uses these warm, vaguely threatening skies for a forensic study of light and its effects, walking in the footsteps of the great landscape painters J. M. W. Turner and Claude Monet. The heavy purple offsets the street light boxes’ electric glow and the lush emerald leaves quivering in the breeze; it enlivens the dusty grays of the buildings, temporarily smoothing their fast-coming obsolescence. Most of the edifices presented in this series exist somewhere in the real world, at least in part. Bercea has collected different bits of buildings, combined and reconfigured them to create this recent-past dystopia, a condensed version of all his sources. With its top lost in the heavens, the pyramid in Imperfect Pearls has something of a Tower of Babel — an overbearing icon of men’s folly, past and to come.
 
Critic and curator Jane Neal describes Bercea’s painting as a kind of archaeology, a process of navigating layers of time, space, colors, and semantics encrusted on the canvas. While the conceptual background of each piece in this new series is too pregnant to ignore, it’s also a ploy for the artist to stretch further his ongoing exploration of the medium, his tireless testing of Albertian perspective, and experiments with the dilatation and refraction of light on the picture plane. Bercea’s practice is decidedly figurative, and yet it also freely taps into a gestural tradition more readily associated with abstraction. Dotted throughout the images — indeed making the images — countless impetuous impastos stand as so many pieces of bravura, only fully appreciable up close. These idiosyncratic touches reinforce the sense of the artist’s presence; his personal experience is rendered palpable through the materiality of the paint. But Bercea always aims beyond intricacies of the specific. In these canvases, he recounts the history of a part of the world as it struggle to find its place in a new geo-political landscape.
 
 
FRANCOIS GHEBALY
2600 La Cienega Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90034
T: +1 323-221-2300
 
FRANCOIS GHEBALY
 
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BEMIS CENTER FOR CONTEMPORARY ARTS, Omaha

LESLIE SHOWS
Face K, 2011
Ink, acrylic, Mylar, sand, canvas, plastic and engraving on aluminum
82 x 48 inches
Courtesy of Haines Gallery, San Francisco, and the Artist
 
 
LESLIE SHOWS
 
April 27 - July 28
Opening Reception: Friday, April 27 | 6:00 - 9:00 p.m.
Gallery Talk: Saturday, April 28 | 12 noon
 
Leslie Shows' expansive and cryptic paintings connect geologic time scales with urgent and intense imagery. In her new work, sculptures of cast sulfur and visually rich, abstracted images of pyrite suggest ruptures of language, meaning, and substances.
 
Shows initiated this body of work while in residence at the Bemis Center in the summer of 2011. Beginning with digitally scanned images of pyrite, Shows constructs and collages large-scale paintings on aluminum panels, with materials including ink, acrylic paint, Mylar, Plexiglas, metal filings, sand, crushed glass, and canvas. The works are spectral, reflective, and aim to accurately depict their object source, yet engage the alchemical mythology of the material. A second body of work includes a series of cast sulfur objects. Shows' casts of everyday forms—remotes, telephones, toys—conjoin cast-away objects with an element that is used heavily in industrial processes.
 
Shows has built deep resonance between the two series and a video work, The Cares of a Family Man(2012). The iron pyrite landscape works are illusory, artificial representations of fool's gold, an economically useless yet psychologically and historically charged sulfide mineral. In contrast the sulfur sculptures are chalky, a waxy opaque yellow copy of senseless objects. The Cares of a Family Man utilizes Kafka's story about an object named Odradek to illustrate the disorienting dimensions and unstable perceptive qualities shared by all her works.
 
For Shows the pyrite landscapes present "a field of features ... doing landscape painting is about being able to spread out details ... where I could have multiple interactions between multiple things—formal, linguistic and conceptual interactions between different images and materials that I would choose to put in a painting together. That's the engine of the painting."
 
Shows is keen to reveal "ways culture and human thought are tied to the structure of objects." Together her works explore value systems, geologic and industrial flows, and human biology in relation to deep time registers. Between epic scale and direct, physiological experience, Shows engages an endless feedback loop between our minds and the material world.
 
Leslie Shows is curated by Hesse McGraw, Bemis Center chief curator.
 
All works courtesy of Haines Gallery, San Francisco, and the Artist.
 
About the artist
Leslie Shows's (AIR 2011) work has most recently been exhibited at Haines Gallery, San Francisco; The Nelson Gallery at University of California, Davis; Atlanta Contemporary Contemporary Art Center; and the Mercosul Biennial, Porto Alegre, Brazil. Her work has been shown at the Orange County Museum of Art, Oakland Art Museum, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Shows is the recipient of a Fleishhacker Foundation Eureka Fellowship, an SFMOMA SECA Award, an Artadia Award and the Tournesol Award from Headlands Center for the Arts. In addition to group shows throughout the United States, Shows has had four solo exhibitions with the Jack Hanley Gallery in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Her work has been written about inThe New Yorker, ArtReview and Artforum, and featured in Harper's. Shows was raised in Juneau, Alaska and currently lives in San Francisco.
 
 
BEMIS CENTER FOR CONTEMPORARY ARTS
724 south 12th street
Omaha, NE 68102
Nebraska
T: +1 402 341-7130
 
BEMIS CENTER FOR CONTEMPORARY ARTS
 
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DAVID RISLEY GALLERY, Copenhagen

Matt Calderwood
Concrete
Installation view
David Risley Gallery, Copenhagen
 
 
MATT CALDERWOOD
Concrete
 
March 24 - May 5
 
We are proud to announce an exhibition of new work by Matt Calderwood.
 
The exhibition will present a single monolithic concrete sculpture made up of six identical, individually hand-cast concrete components, assembled in situ. This work will stand around 2.5 metres tall and weigh 1 and a half tons.
 
Previous sculptures by Calderwood relied on an added element (water barrels, sandbags) for stability. This balancing act, combined with cheap, everyday materials such as plaster-board, made overt reference to impermanence and fragility.
 
The new sculpture in "Concrete" supports itself — it is a selfsufficient closed-loop system, held in equilibrium but with clear paths of contradicting and counterbalancing forces within. Each of the 6 elements needs to play its role to make the sculpture possible. They are mutually dependent on each other to make a united sculptural form.
 
Calderwood is aware of the fragility and decay inherent to the assembly and reassembly of the pieces. Moving these heavy elements is a fraught process. The aim is always to attain perfection while bearing the humility of its impossibility. This is the burden the new work internalizes – the knowledge of its own fallibility.
 
In contrast to the grandstanding bravado of the Modernist project, this concrete behemoth is aware of the inevitability of its decline. One lives trying to protect one's body from harm, then learns to love scars when they occur.
 
Calderwood speaks about the delicacy of these concrete lumps, about the fragility of the edges, the responsibility that creating and moving them brings. Like any system, the individual components have to be cared for to make a balanced whole. It is a hard-won equilibrium that must be cared for to sustain.
 
Matt Calderwood (1975, Northern Ireland) studied Fine Art at Newcastle College and Sunderland University. Recent shows include Dublin Contemporary Biennale, Nova Mesto, Galerija Simulaker, Slovenia, Redux, Cristin Tierney, NYC. AFM collection highlights and latest acquisitions, CCA Andratx, Mallorca. One Another, Amikam Toren and Matt Calderwood, Anthony Reynolds Gallery, London all in 2011. Summer Exhibition (Richard Wilson’s curated room), Royal Academy of Arts, London (2010), Quiet Revolution (Hayward Touring Exhibition), Milton Keynes Gallery, Milton Keynes, UK (2009) and Material Intelligence, Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, UK (touring) (2009). Forthcoming solo exhibitions include Galerie Paul Andriesse, Amsterdam.
 
 
DAVID RISLEY GALLERY
Bredgade 65A
DK-1260 Copenhagen
T: +45 26163671
E: info @ davidrisleygallery.com
 
DAVID RISLEY GALLERY
 
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Y GALLERY, New York

Studio view with Convex Coal Mirror (coal, 72 x 72 x 8 inches) on floor
 
 
ALEJANDRA PRIETO
INVISIBLE DUST
 
April 11 - 29, 2012
 
CCU and Y Gallery are pleased to present Invisible Dust, the first New York solo show, curated by Cecilia Jurado of Chilean Artist Alejandra Prieto, winner of the CCU Art Grant. Within her artistic practice, Prieto is dedicated to exploring ideas regarding the status of the object, its conditions of production, functionality and expository modes in the contemporary art world. Her recent coal-based works reflect on the invisible and visible mechanisms and modes of representation in contemporary spaces. She establishes and makes visible the relationships between the sophistication of design and the unskilled labor required for reproduction, and between subjective modes of market entry and purely aesthetic objects.
 
In the exhibition Prieto presents a constellation of four objects made out of coal that provide a series of tensions related to the look and invisible processes of production and exchange. These objects include a mirror, two large coal dust prints on silk and a simulation of a coal dust cloud projected onto a rustic screen made of the same material. The mirror, considered the vertex of this constellation of elements is, more than anything else, an object of gaze; its classical position as an allegory of art confirms this status. Prieto’s mirror reminds us of a sculptural materiality, not merely a reflecting surface, but also primarily a luxurious, decorative and aesthetic object. But precisely one of the features that make the mirror a single object is that its functionality supposes its dematerialization. That is, when we use a mirror, we forget its main charactestic as an object. We look at the object and its composition, or we look at the reflection it gives us. This is the paradoxical condition we are given as these sides converge somehow and then bypass each other. The functionality of coal as a reflective element makes these two positions appear in one single moment, a function that Prieto rescues not discovers since coal was effectively used this way by Pre-Columbian civilizations.
 
If the mirror is the apex, the coal dust is the master; a floating signifier, one can say. Around all the objects in the exhibition, the idea of repetition, reproduction, and insistence is generated. There is an insistence of the residual especially a residual status in our culture. However not in a practical sense since our economic systems still use coal as an energy resource crucial however invisible. Coal is an object one does not see, nor do we see those who extract it, nor the hard work that emerges from the bowels of our sophisticated and hyper-visible world that declares this product beautiful and democratic through a myriad of objects to consume. Cleaning the commodity hides the dust thus insisting that all the invisible inhabit the visible. This invisible dust is the residue, the outcome of a hand that produces and as Marx declares, is obliterated in the finished product. In Invisible Dust the obscenity of our system enters the picture. It is not about an aesthetic medium, but about capturing and making that dust cloud visible. This is emphasized by figuratively sweeping the dust out from under the carpet. Prieto makes our repressed objects of desire, the undetectable darkness, appear in the mirror, the silk and ghostly projections on the white walls of the gallery.
 
Alejandra Prieto was born in Chile in 1980. She attended PUC University for her BFA and Chile University for her MFA. She has shown internationally, recently her work was part of VII Biennale Mercosur, Projetaveis, Porto Alegre, Brasil; Triennale de Chile, "El Terremoto de Chile", Contemporary Art Museum, Santiago, Chile; VI Biennale SIART, La Paz, Bolivia; among others. She won first prize for the prestigious CCU Grant and is currently a resident at the International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP). She lives and works in Santiago, Chile and will participate in the upcoming XI Havana Biennial.
 
Prieto was the first prize winner of the CCU Art Grant, selected by a jury that included Cecilia Jurado (Y Gallery), Ivan Navarro (artist), Milan Ivelic (Director Museo de Bellas Artes de Chile), Daniel Swimburn (Director Artes y Letras Diario El Mercurio), Pamela Prado (Coordinadora Consejo Nacional de Cultura y las Artes) and Macarena Goldenberg (Jefe de Cultura CCU), in a national contest in Chile.
 
Through CCU Art Grant, CCU intends to acknowledge and strengthen the development and internationalization of Chilean contemporary artists, to create an environment for dialogue promotion, as well as to exchange experience and knowledge among artists and entities related to art at a worldwide level, to show their work and to create networks.
 
 
Y GALLERY
165 Orchard Street
New York, NY 11370-2012
T: +1 917 721 4539
 
Y GALLERY
 
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GALERIE STEFAN RÖPKE, Cologne

ALEKSANDAR DURAVCEVIC
All of them, 2011-2012
graphite on black paper / Grafit auf schwarzem Papier
dimensions variable / Größe variable
Photograph courtesy the artist and Mary Raap
 
 
ALEKSANDAR DURAVCEVIC
"TELL ME YOURS I WILL TELL YOU MINE"
 
13. April - 16. June 2012
 
Galerie Stefan Röpke is pleased to present a solo exhibition of works by Aleksandar Duravcevic, on view from April 13 through June 16, 2012.  This is his second exhibition at the gallery.
 
The title piece of the show “TELL ME YOURS I WILL TELL YOU MINE” is a neon text work that invites the viewer in and sets the tone of the exhibition. Casting purple light, the work exudes a regal glow with the color of royalty, but also alludes to the traditional color of death and atonement in the Christian faith. As with all his works, Duravcevic mines the symbols and visual language of histories that are of great interest to him ranging from religion to the Renaissance, tribal costumes and rituals to number systems, philosophy, literature... the list goes on.  The result is a poetic amalgam of fine works from simple virtuosic drawings to grand scale minimalist sculptures and installations; always rendered with highest level of craft.  And with this body of work, the artist addresses secrets and dreams, confession and contrition, failure and recompense, reaching in from a very personal place but commenting on a general human condition.
 
The second room of the gallery presents “All of Them”, the result of a grand and ambitious project the artist undertook as both a commentary and a reaction to the pain of loss.  Using a feather-filled pillow (his own) as a poetic metaphor that contained all his dreams and where each day ended, Duravcevic made a life-size portrait of each and every feather.  Each lovingly rendered as a Zen-like act of contrition and healing, and as homage to all the dreams and hopes that they had symbolically contained.
 
Aleksandar Duravcevic was born in Montenegro, lives and works in Brooklyn, New York, and is a visiting professor at the Hunter College MFA Program. His works are in numerous private and public collections including the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, and Museum of Fine Arts Boston, among others.
 
 
GALERIE STEFAN RÖPKE
St. Apern-Strasse 17-21
50667 Cologne
Germany
T: +49 022125 55 59
 
GALERIE STEFAN RÖPKE
 
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ALMINE RECH GALLERY, Paris

Liu Wei
Library No.6, 2012
Books, wood, steel and hardware
450 x 280 x 120 cm
177 1/8 x 110 1/4 x 47 1/4 inches
Courtesy of Almine Rech Gallery, Paris
 
 
LIU WEI
FOREIGN
 
April 14th until May 16th, 2012
 
The Almine Rech Gallery is pleased to present Foreign, the first solo exhibition by Liu Wei in Paris.
 
Born in Beijing in 1972, Liu Wei was the subject in 2011 of a solo exhibition entitled Trilogy at the Minsheng Art Museum of Shanghai, and in that same year he took part in the exhibition Liu Wei and Ai Weiwei at the Faurschou Foundation Beijing. In 2010 he was included in the Shanghai Biennale and contributed to DREAMLANDS, a show held at the Georges Pompidou Centre in Paris.
 
The installations, paintings and videos of Liu Wei, the artist spearheading the new Chinese art scene, constantly oscillate between order and disorder. Through his work, Liu Wei translates the chaos of his native city, a city that is in a permanent state of development and which keeps reinventing itself to fill the exponential needs of its hyperproductivity. Made out of schoolbooks, his at times sprawling installations waver between utopia and dystopia. They depict cities in a state of metamorphosis, home to a range of iconic buildings, from the Pentagon to Saint Peter’s Basilica, among others. Liu Wei refuses the ruling principle of an identifiable style and conventional aesthetic criteria. His work is an attempt to perpetuate the precepts of a country with a Confucian tradition, as can be seen in the series of paintings Purple Air (2005-2011) and Meditation (2009-). At first sight, the works in Purple Air resemble a reflection on the typically Western notion of a univocal, horizontal landscape. Besides being a homage to Richter, the series conveys above all the fragmented vision of a polluted and gridded city, somewhere between a kaleidoscope, a TV test card and a bar code, a vision which brings to light more or less perceptible worlds. The paintings in the Meditation series, on the other hand, revert to a horizontal vision of the world. Consisting of broad-brush strokes, these canvases, depicting both the break of day and night itself, reflect the growing distance between Liu Wei and an urban architecture that is both alienating and stimulating. Above all, these canvases evoke the notion of perspective in the pictorial field and the manner in which the artist positions himself in relation to his own artistic practice.
 
Julie Boukobza
 
 
ALMINE RECH GALLERY Paris
19 Rue Saintonge
F-75003 Paris
France
T: +33 (0)1 45 83 71 90
 
ALMINE RECH GALLERY
 
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FRITH STREET GALLERY, London

Juan Muñoz
Untitled, 2001
Pigmented polyester resin, fibreglass and bronze
140 x 65 x 80 cm
Courtesy of Frith Street Gallery, London
 
 
JUAN MUÑOZ
AN INACCESSIBLE MOMENT
DRAWINGS AND SCULPTURES
 
25 April - 20 June 2012
Private view Tuesday 24 April 6-8pm
 
The exhibition will be accompanied by a publication with an essay by Adrian Searle.
 
Juan Muñoz (1953 -2001) came to international prominence in the mid-1980s with sculptural installations that placed the figure in architectural environments. He described himself as a storyteller, and often arranged his figures and objects in carefully staged configurations that hint at unsettling and ambiguous scenarios. The way that the viewer encounters a work of art was important to Muñoz. He was fascinated by the tension between the illusory and the real, using tricks of scale and perspective to choreograph the viewer’s experience.
 
This exhibition, co-curated by Jane Hamlyn and writer and critic Adrian Searle, features several important figurative sculptures which were originally intended to be part of Muñoz’s celebrated installation Double Bind (2001) at Tate Modern. In Double Bind Muñoz created a work that dramatically altered Tate’s Turbine Hall. Passenger lifts rose and fell through the spaces created by Muñoz; figures looked down from inaccessible rooms while pools of artificial light and trompe l’oeil shafts added to the unsettling and filmic atmosphere. This, the artist’s last major work, presented the viewer with a series of scenarios which played on perspective and illusion, visibility and invisibility. Though the sculptures on show at Frith Street Gallery were never shown in Double Bind they have the same intriguing character; slightly smaller than life-size their expressions and actions remain unclear as if engaged in their own private dramas.
 
Also on show are a number of rarely seen drawings and prints. These include a series of figure studies made between 1991 and 1996 as well as highly atmospheric images of dark domestic interiors from the Mobilario Series. These works illustrate the importance of drawing in Muñoz’s practice.
 
 
FRITH STREET GALLERY
17-18 Golden Square
London W1F 9JJ
T: +44 (0) 20 7494 1550
 
FRITH STREET GALLERY
 
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