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CGP LONDON presents MARK TITCHNER

MARK TITCHNER
 
Exhibition runs until 4 May | Wed - Sun 11am - 5pm
Grumbling Fur Performance | Dilston Grove | Sun 27th April, 3pm
 
A 30th anniversary exhibition in Cafe Gallery and Dilston Grove.

 
Mark Titchner Cafe Gallery 2014, photo Miyako Narita
 
In celebration of the 30th anniversary of the opening of Cafe Gallery and the 15th anniversary of the opening Dilston Grove, CGP London has commissioned a single artist to present works across it’s two spaces.
 
The exhibition encompasses a number of media including digital print, wall drawing, video, sculpture and installation exploring systems of belief, both secular and spiritual, often focusing on the marginalised, discredited or forgotten ideologies and objects we place our faith in.
 
Using the impersonal language of the public realm, ranging from the quasi-mysticism of corporate mission statements to the maxims of revolutionary socialism, his work exhorts us to believe in it. Motifs taken from advertising, religious iconography, club flyers, trade union banners, prog rock and political propaganda all vie for our attention.
 
The common denominator is a quest for enlightenment; a desire for some form of transcendence; and yet, abstracted from its original context the message appears drained of meaning. We know that we are being asked to respond but the purpose is unclear, leaving us only with the formal means of exhortation and our own desire for meaning.
 
Titchner has specifically conceived a new series of wall drawings for Cafe Gallery. Early on in his career wall drawing was a central focus. Originally based on Op Art wallpaper designs from the artist’s childhood home, the works moved through an exploration of diagrammatic and modernist design motifs to the artist’s first works with text. In 2001, Titchner abandoned these works to concentrate on the new possibilities offered by large-scale digital print. However, a new wall drawing commissioned for the reopening of the South London Gallery in 2010 led Titchner to reappraise this element of his practise and it has since continued to be a significant aspect of his work.
 


Mark Titchner 'ROSE' Dilston Grove 2014, photo Miyako Narita
 
The exhibition continues across the park at Dilston Grove with ‘ROSE’, a hallucinatory new collaboration with acclaimed musicians Daniel O'Sullivan and Alexander Tucker and a distinct contrast to the hard edge, silent but vocal graphic works at Cafe Gallery.  As you approach the enchanting hum beckons you inside it as if the building itself has come to life. Once you enter you are surrounded by sound, moving image and Dilston Grove itself all working together to impress something upon you, something uplifting, something disconcerting?
 
YOU LIVE
YOU LEAD
YOU CREATE
YOU CHANGE
YOU WORK
YOU DREAM
 
There is no question that this work was specially developed for this unique space. The work combines large format text with fast cut images relating to the four elements; water, fire, air and earth. Moving through three increasingly unsettling hypnotic sections, affirmative texts of the kind encountered in self-improvement manuals and corporate speak, creep gradually towards something more sinister. This seemingly affirmative, commonly used language contrasting the imaginary landscape of individual aspiration with our real conditions of flawed existence.
 
The work was influenced by interrogation techniques found in the declassified CIA Kubark manual.
 
The soundtrack for the work is an original piece written and performed by Daniel O'Sullivan and Alexander Tucker, which will be performed by them live on Sunday 27th April 3 - 4pm.
 


Cafe Gallery Southwark Park during the 1980’s, CGP London Archives
 
 
CGP London 1984 - 2014  - A different kind of gallery celebrates 30 years
 
2014 sees the 30th anniversary of CGP London, a public art gallery that began in a derelict cafe and now boasts unique exhibition space across two sites in one of London’s most beautiful parks, a model record of community engagement, and a hugely popular exhibition programme. Unlike other public art galleries, CGP London has been managed and run since its inception by artists.
 


Cafe Gallery Southwark Park during the 1980’s, CGP London Archives
 
The early 1980s saw a thriving artistic community in Bermondsey, which had lost its docks and other big employers and still bore traces of wartime bombing. Artists took advantage of low rents in this depressed area with studio space and accommodation for many provided in places like Butlers Wharf and St Katherine’s Dock. The Bermondsey Artists’ Group was founded in 1983 to advocate for artists and to find exhibition venues of which were rare outside central London. Within a year, the group had secured use of the old cafe by the lido in Southwark Park, and voluntarily refurbished and opened it as an exhibition space. Since then, CGP London has consistently been ambitious and taken risks in regeneration and programming.
 


Cafe Gallery Southwark Park 2013, CGP London Archives
 
Three decades on, and CGP London’s success can be measured in the transformation it has worked on itself and its surroundings. Before the old park cafe was quietly rebuilt as a modern gallery in 2001, CGP opened the derelict church on the edge of Southwark Park as a temporary exhibition space. This proved so successful that they took it on raising the capital funding to renovate it for long term use as a gallery. Dilston Grove became their second exhibition space and now CGP is the only London gallery with two completely contrasting sites for presenting work: a cool white cube and a cavernous, raw installation space. Reflecting both this uniquely individual visual arts environment, and its artist-led management, CGP’s programme is known for taking risks and allowing artists a creative freedom unknown elsewhere. When CGP opened, an art gallery outside of central London was a rare phenomenon. Bermondsey is now a key centre of this city’s arts ecosystem.
 
CGP London is a unique visual arts venue that not only proves the positive power of such places, but also the singular difference artist managers can make.
 
For exhibition programme and opening hours visit www.cgplondon.org
 


Dilston Grove 2014, photo Miyako Narita
 
 
CGP LONDON
Centre of Southwark Park
London
SE16 2UA
 
www.cgplondon.org

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PROJECT ANYWHERE:

2014 INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITION PROGRAM & 2015 CALL FOR PROPOSALS
 
Project Anywhere is an expanded exhibition model encompassing the entire globe in which the role of curator is replaced with a peer review system comparable with a refereed journal. Emphasizing research outside conventional exhibition circuits, Project Anywhere is specifically dedicated to promoting art at the outermost limits of location-specificity.
 
Following an exhaustive international peer validation and editorial process, we are delighted to promote our 2014 international exhibition program: http://www.projectanywhere.net
 
 
Department Of Biological Flow, Channel Surf

 
Anna Romanenko, Björn Kühn & Gabriel Hensche, Liminal Dome

Erin Bosenberg, Listening For Narrative: Bringing Intimacies Into The Public Presentation Of The Artist

 
John Ryan & Tom Watts, A Popular Destination

 
Ronit Eisenbach, Sharon Mansur & Aleksandra Vrebalov, In Situ: Exploring Sites-In-Transition

 
The deadline for proposal submissions for our 2015 program is September 1, 2014.
 
For proposal guidelines and more information go to http://www.projectanywhere.net
 

 

AEROPLASTICS, Brussels

HeHe
Fleur de Lys
2009
Installation
285 x 95 x 85 cm
Unique
courtesy of the artists and Aeroplastics contemporay, Brussels
 
 
HeHe
Anthroposphere
 
exhibition runs until March 15th
 
The duo HeHe (Helen Evans, 1972 and Heiko Hansen, 1970) personifies a new generation of artists who create a link between the sphere of technological/digital art (too self-referential, and frequented solely by the initiated), and that of contemporary art (reluctant to accept new modes of expression based on subverting new informational/communicational technologies). Each of these spheres has developed its distinct circuits of communication and 'diffusion', and common points of contact between the two remain rare. HeHe, winner of the Golden Nica at Ars Electronica (Linz) in 2008 - equivalent to the Golden Lion of the Venice Biennial for digital arts - regularly exhibit in locations dedicated to technological art, and extend their interventions into the public domain internationally (New York, Paris, Helsinki, Liverpool, ...). By mounting this first personal exhibition in Belgium, Aeroplastics offers the duo the opportunity to present their work in all its complexity, and to demonstrate the contemporary relevance of the themes they study and pursue.
 
These themes are essentially connected to the conflictual rapport between a humanity that is caught up in an unbridled quest for new sources of energy (along with new ways of wasting it), and an ever-increasingly fragile natural environment. On the gallery's first floor, two installations illustrate recent catastrophes caused by the exploitation of the main energy resources from the industrial age: oil and nuclear energy. Is There a Horizon in the Deepwater (2011) stages the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil platform in 2010, while Fleur de Lys (2009), a nuclear plant plunged in an aquarium, evokes the dangers of atomic energy. Here, one naturally thinks of the Fukushima disaster in 2011, but there is also a manner of premonition: at its origin, the piece was conceived as being part of a series devoted to clouds (pollution) generated by human activity. The title Fleur de Lys harks back to the stylized form of the smoke plume emitted by the cooling tower, but also symbolically refers to France, a country 80% dependent on the atom for its energy needs.
 
This study of 'man-made clouds' gave rise to a spectacular performance in the public space, namely Green Cloud (2009), consisting of outlining and highlighting (by way of a directed laser beam) the fumes emitted from a power plant in Helsinki. The sociological and political implications of this project are manifold. In this vein, the prefecture of Seine-Saint-Denis prohibited Green Cloud being projected against the incinerator at Saint-Ouen, arguing that such would contribute "to propagating, in the public's mind, a strongly negative image of the incinerator plant"... And because pollution is only rarely visible to the naked eye: with a series initiated at the Centre Pompidou (Air de Paris), HeHe proposed to make visible the (mediocre) quality of the air we breathe via coloured photographed urban panoramas. Air de Bruxelles was made especially for this exhibition; the fixed image doubles as an under-construction internet site aimed to archive (in real time) atmospheric conditions as recorded by various sensors - or how landscape joins up with that of digital networks.
 
Naturally, every actor carries his or its own responsibility in this state of affairs. And although they defend against passing judgment on whomever, preferring the mise en scène (oftentimes humorous) to moralising, the HeHe pair don't miss targeting the current aberration of automobile traffic (particularly 4X4's) in city-centres (for that matter, HeHe is very active in projects to bring back alternative forms of public transport on the old Parisian intra mural railway line). The Porsche Cayenne, outsized, with its 189 grams per kilometre of CO2, is a perfect illustration. Launched in a miniature model producing a pink cloud through the streets of New York (Toy Emissions, 2007), and dressed up with a feather of the same colour (Porsche's Plume, 2011), it has nonetheless to take on competition from the Land Rover Discovery (269 g for the V6 Supercharged model), above all in its spatial variant (Beckham's one-way ticket to the moon edition, 2013)... And it isn't even necessary to drive a car in order to pollute. The simple fact of existing is sufficient: Million Parts (2008) converts the CO2 emitted by our human organism into modulated light within an enclosed space. "The set-up induces CO2 levels that surpass internationally accepted norms for enclosed spaces, indeed high enough for a last gasp!"
 
Finally, the series "Domestic Catastrophes" focuses on the pollution generated by objects we use in our daily lives, deliberately targeting the simplest among them (pointless to once again raise the question of cell phones or computers, regularly treated in the media): a wall-socket suddenly producing smoke that engulfs the room (Prise en charge, 2011), while a clothes iron, suspended from the ceiling, turns furiously in the air while belching jets of steam. Sometimes, a rise in the collective consciousness results in laws banning toxic substances from everyday life: for those who've forgotten what a room full of smokers smells like, HeHe have produced a delicate fragrance based on organic tobacco, Tobacco Perfume (2010). As for those who judge such laws to be anti-libertarian, they are invited to grill a cigarette under the Smoking Lamp (2005): their act will not go unnoticed...

 

Pierre-Yves Desaive
 
 
AEROPLASTICS contemporary
32 rue Blanche
1060 Brussels
Belgium
T: 32 2 537 22 02
 
AEROPLASTICS
 
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greengrassi, London

Pae White
Genau or Never
Courtesy of the artist and greengrassi, London
 
 
PAE WHITE
Genau or Never
 
24 January - 1 March 2014
 
greengrassi is pleased to present Pae White's fifth exhibition at the gallery. The work, titled Genau or Never, is a reconfiguration of an unrealized commission originally planned for Gloucester Road tube station. In this iteration, a small portion of the original plan has been processed through a randomizer as a way to recontextualize it within a space with a new set of concerns. While the previous version utilized nearly 2450 tubes of neon referencing ornamental motifs from a mythical magic carpet, the new version is what occurs as that carpet unravels: unencumbered by its former logic and site, the ornament is set free, generating its own logic for its new environment.
 
The 540 neon tubes used here represent a variation on white, each specifically selected because of its resemblance to daylight. Exposure to this kind of illumination enhances feelings of wellbeing; the tonal shifts that result from the different LUX levels in the neon allowing it to function as a giant "SAD" lamp during a seasonally dark time.
 
Pae White lives and works in Los Angeles. Recent exhibitions include O R L L E G R O, Museum für Angewandt Kunst, Vienna (2013); Too Much Night, Again, South London Gallery, London (2013); In Love with Tomorrow, Langen Foundation, Dusseldorf (2013); and SUMMER XX, Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia (2012). Her work was featured in Soft Pictures, Foundazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin (2013); in Art & Textile, Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Wolfsburg (2013); Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris (2013); Mardin Biennale, Turkey (2012); San Diego Museum of Art, San Diego (2012) and in Print/Out, MoMA, New York (2012), among others.
 
 
greengrassi
1a Kempsford Road
(off Wincott Street)
London
SE11 4NU
T: +44 (0) 20 7840 9101
 
greengrassi
 
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Galerie Rupert Pfab, Düsseldorf

Helmut Schweizer
ATOMIC ELEGY . HARD - BOILED WONDERLAND Part I (detail), 1985 - 2013
mixed media
Courtesy of Galerie Rupert Pfab, Düsseldorf
 
 
HELMUT SCHWEIZER
MELANCOLIA. 8/6 - 3/11. A CHI DI COMPETENZA
 
11 January - 15 February 2014
 
"A Klee painting named 'Angelus Novus' shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress."
[Walter Benjamin: On the Concept of History (1940), Thesis IX]
 
Galerie Rupert Pfab is pleased to present the exhibition Helmut Schweizer - MELANCOLIA. 8/6 - 3/11. A CHI DI COMPETENZA.
 
The concept and action artist Helmut Schweizer (*1946), whose subject matter is largely dominated by the natural sciences and their history, focuses intensively on the threats of nuclear technology and the way society deals with these. Like Walther Benjamin's "Angel of History", he looks into the past, which is determined by human civilisation and its technology, and in doing so exposes much of what was once considered to be progress as catastrophe. When it comes to his critical observations in the field of tension between nature, culture and civilisation, he is first and foremost merely a dedicated collector of facts with all their details. Inspired by this knowledge gained over the course of numerous decades, he then consistently develops new works of visual art, whereby his intentions are never moral.
 
Helmut Schweizer studied painting, philosophy and art history in Karlsruhe from 1967 through 1973, at a time when the Düsseldorf-based artist Joseph Beuys exerted a great influence on the discourse of contemporary art. Inspired by Beuys' actions, Helmut Schweizer was already striving to transgress boundaries in art and, to this day, continues to make use of the most varied media and materials in the aesthetic realisation of his goals. He creates complex installations and scenarios, within which the laboratory is a central motif. He combines early works from the 1970s which focused on the study of plants, exposing them to chemical processes and photographing them together with large furnishings, equipped with fragile glass containers. These held luminous, chemically reactive fluids and other ephemeral substances, which visualize time by means of oxidation and decomposition. Installation works such as these are combined with complex collages of images, colours and texts with references to important scientists of the 20th century, as well as music, literature and especially the visual arts. Helmut Schweizer quotes artists such as Albrecht Dürer, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Caspar David Friedrich, Hieronymus Bosch and Giorgio de Chirico. In his recent works on paper, press images of the nuclear disasters in Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Fukushima merge together with woodcuts by the Japanese artist Hiroshige and works by the Surrealists Max Ernst and Marcel Duchamp.
 
The exhibition "Melancolia" in Galerie Rupert Pfab continues on the themes presented in the installation "Atemwende" (Turning Point of Breath), which Helmut Schweizer presented in the exhibition "LABORATORIUM" in the Städtische Galerie Wolfsburg in 2010. In the first space of the gallery, he will also present one of his earliest works from the 1960s, "Berg & Wolke" (Mountain and Cloud), which forms a kind of prelude to the main installation. This work consists of a space lit with black light and equipped with glass display cases glowing with uranin, which both captivates and irritates the viewer simultaneously, as well as a large "laboratory" with furnishings and large-scale works on paper. Both spaces deal with the nuclear disaster of Fukushima as the tragic result of the discovery of atomic energy in the late 19th century.
 
Helmut Schweizer is represented in numerous international collections, including the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, the Museum Ludwig in Cologne and the Kupferstichkabinett Berlin, and participated in the "documenta IX", curated by Jan Hoet in 1992, as well as other significant exhibitions in important museums. In 2010, the Städtische Galerie Wolfsburg presented a comprehensive retrospective. He will also participate with a large-scale installation in the exhibition "Kunst und Alchemie - Das Geheimnis der Verwandlung" (Art and Alchemy - The Mystery of Transformation), which will take place in the Museum Kunstpalast in Düsseldorf in 2014 in conjunction with the "Quadriennale" of the State Capital of Düsseldorf.
 
Exhibition opening on Friday, 10 Januar 2014, 7:00 - 9:00 p.m.
The artist will be present.
Artist Talk in conjunction with the Düsseldorf Photo Weekend on
Saturday, 1 February 2014, 5:00 p.m.,
moderated by Dr. Dedo von Kerrsenbrock-Grosigk (Curator, Museum Kunstpalast)
 
 
Galerie Rupert Pfab
Poststraße 3
D-40213
Düsseldorf
Germany
T: +49 211.13 16 66
 
Galerie Rupert Pfab
 
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Ratio 3, San Francisco

Mitzi Pederson
Untitled, 2014 (detail)
Courtesy of Ratio 3, San Francisco
 
 
MITZI PEDERSON
3:43
 
January 10 - February 15
Opening Reception: Friday, January 10, 6 - 8pm
 
Ratio 3 is pleased to announce 3:43, an exhibition of new work by Mitzi Pederson. For her fifth exhibition with Ratio 3, and her first at the gallery's Mission Street location, Pederson has worked continuously in the gallery space for several weeks, turning rudimentary materials into a complete installation. The resulting works bring Pederson's unique sensibility into dialogue with time and its effects on a given space.
 
Continuing her exploration of deceptively simple arrangements, Pederson creates elegant objects that combine contradictory gestures. In several works, the fluidity and lightness of fabric contrasts with the tension of bowed lumber. Other works combine Pederson's interest in ephemerality with her intuitive sense of weight and permanence - strips of fabric draped over beams and blocks of concrete seem to vanish depending on vantage point and time of day.
 
By referencing a moment in time, 3:43 acknowledges both a specific moment in an architectural space, and the gradual shift of environmental conditions from one day to another. The light at 3:43 is different from the light at any other time of day, yet each day's 3:43 is slightly different from the last. The works comprising 3:43 showcase Pederson's discerning use of common materials, addressing not only spatial themes of balance and tension but also temporal themes of light and presence. In the spontaneity and thoughtfulness of their construction, Pederson's sculptural objects manage to seem both fleeting and permanent.
 
Mitzi Pederson lives and works in San Francisco. Born in 1976 in Stuart, Florida, Pederson earned a BFA from Carnegie Mellon University in 1999. In 2004, Pederson completed an MFA in Painting and Drawing at the California College of the Arts. A selection of her solo exhibitions includes Schleicher/Lange, Paris (2012); World Class Boxing, Miami (2009); the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2008); and White Columns, New York (2006). Pederson has participated in numerous group exhibitions, including the American Academy in Rome (2013); the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art (2011); MACRO FUTURE, Rome (2009); Milton Keynes Gallery and Harris Museum, Preston, UK (2009); ACME, Los Angeles (2009); and the 2008 Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Her work is in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Henry Art Gallery, Seattle; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Berkeley Museum of Art and Pacific Film Archive; and the UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles.
 
Gallery hours: Tuesday - Saturday, 11am - 6pm, and by appointment.

 
Ratio 3
2831A Mission Street
San Francisco, CA 94110
T: +1 4158213371
 
Ratio 3
 
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Galería Fúcares Madrid

Jaime Pitarch
"MOMENTUM", 2013
Armario manipulado
220 x 113 x 200 cm
Courtesy of the artist and Galeria Fúcares Madrid 
 
 
JAIME PITARCH
"Despacio / Destiempo"
 
From November 16th 2013 to January 18th 2014
 
The Fúcares Gallery in Madrid is pleased to present the third solo exhibition by Jaime Pitarch (Barcelona, 1963).
 
 
Despacio/Destiempo ["Slowly/Out of sync"] brings together a number of pieces made in 2012, although one of them, Momentum, is part of an eponymous series that the artist has been creating since 1997. The elements shown in the exhibition make up a sort of symbolic archaeology about what, in statistical terms, we refer to as social cost. Retrieved from the streets, from the Internet or from the world of museums, they serve as tragicomic testimonies of our processes of adaptation in a capitalistic environment.
 
The following pieces are included in the exhibition:
 
Momentum (2012)
Bits and pieces from a wardrobe rescued from the street and reassembled so that they can be contained in its only drawer, while the wardrobe itself remains precariously upright. A metaphor for human beings and their struggle to remain standing, using everything that they were originally given to build their personas.
If the framework in which the pieces in this series is of an ontological nature, the location of its raw materials (discarded furniture gathered from the streets) draws a map of the districts in the cities where the artist has lived and that have undergone a process of gentrification which politicises it (so here the root polis acquires makes perfect sense). The work therefore tackles the question of adaptation to the environment, focussing on the human flotsam and jetsam that this process entails.
Hence the use of remains of materials produced and discarded by man as a metaphor for man himself, and the manipulation of objects that eventually refer back to themselves but are unable to go beyond themselves. The result leads to an isolated man, removed from the inertia of his context.
 
Personal quest (2012)
A list was prepared starting from what YouTube offers you when typing the letters of the alphabet in its search window.
From A to Z, the window that automatically opens when entering each of the letters of the alphabet has been taken out of context and replicated. This floating window appears as if printed on a sheet of white, A4 photographic paper - in other words, a standardised format.
The search for oneself, derived from a spiritual existential loss is here substituted by a shared ritual. The suggestions that appear when entering each letter are the result of millions of personal searches on the Web at particular coordinates of time and geography. They reflect our own standardised conduct, reduce us to statistical data, and dilute our very individuality: there is nothing personal left in this search, nor does anything transcendental appear in its result.
 
Projector (2012)
At the back of the gallery, a slide projector projects texts on the wall that, slide after slide, deconstruct the rationale of their own presence in the gallery room. The meaning of the text shifts little by little from a technical description of the elements involved in the mise-en-scène, via the consequences in economic terms and of credibility that a potential acquisition by a knowledgeable viewer would have, finally suggesting the existence of certain mechanisms, which, being similar to those used for steering people in disciplinary societies, are subliminally activated in the institutional sphere of art. The projector itself, an apparently inoffensive element, can thus be one of them.
 
 
Galería FÚCARES Madrid
Calle Doctor Fourquet 28
28012 Madrid
Spain
T: +34 91 319 74 02
 
Galería FÚCARES
 
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i8 Gallery, Reykjavik

Alicja Kwade
In-fluence, 2013
Installation view
i8 Gallery, Reykjavik, 2013
 
 
ALICJA KWADE
Solid Stars and Other Conditions
 
Until 14 December 2013
 
i8 is pleased to present, Alicja Kwade's Solid Stars and Other Conditions, the artist's first exhibition with the gallery. The show will feature new sculptures and installations and will run from October 31st to December 14th.
 
Alicja Kwade has received much recognition in recent years for her sculptures, installations, and videos. Oscillating between the familiar and the fictional, she combines ready-mades and skilful craftsmanship in sophisticated installations that provoke, amuse, and surprise. Her work possesses formal sculptural qualities with roots in minimalism bordering the surreal or the uncanny.
 
Kwade is interested in scientific phenomena and musings, manipulating objects, processes, and concepts in ways that seek to challenge, if not defy, the laws of physics. She looks for simple ways to arrive at an understanding of reality in which established conveniences and materials are re-arranged and re-valued. Kwade questions cultural hierarchies and agreements by challenging objects' functional identities and by scrutinising the inherent quality of materials and conditions.
 
Her world is one in which nothing can be taken for granted.
 
Stellar Day, 2013. A half-ton boulder sits on the gallery floor. At a first glance it looks like an ordinary stone, however, careful observation reveals that the stone is rotating - very slowly, in a clock-wise motion. Moving against the direction of the earth's rotation, the stone completes one full turn in 23 hours, 56 minutes and 4,099 seconds, the equivalent of one day measured in "Sidereal time" (a time scale based on the Earth's rate of rotation measured relative to the fixed stars). The boulder can thus be seen as the only 'still' thing on Earth, given an almost extraterrestrial quality, located on Earth but not subject to the planet's physical laws.
 
In-fluence, 2013. Mounted on the wall is a 1930's institutional wall clock with a nail next to it in on the lower left hand side. The clock's second hand speeds up during a 15 second period of each minute when it passes the nail as if affected by it in a peculiar way. Despite this interruption each minute remains "correct". Many of Kwade's works deal with the phenomenon of time and clocks as entities hold an ongoing fascination for her as the ultimate fusion of the temporal and the physical.
 
The Heavy Weight of Light, 2012. Lengths of various industrial materials - bronze, copper, and wood - together with sheets of mirror and stainless steel are subtly arranged side by side. Because the individual elements of the installation are bent ninety-degrees along the wall and floor, usual material properties are transformed; otherwise hard substances becoming soft or liquid and appearing to slide gracefully down the wall onto the floor.
 
Alicja Kwade was born in 1979 in Katowice, Poland and currently lives and works in Berlin. She studied at Universität der Bildenden Kunst, UdK, in Berlin. Solo exhibitions include: Kunstmuseen Krefeld, Haus Esters, Germany (2013); Skulpturenpark Köln, Cologne (2013); Kunsthal 44 Møen, Denmark (2012); ZKM Karlsruhe, Germany (2011); Oldenburger Kunstverein, Germany (2011); Kestner Gesellschaft, Hanover, Germany (2010); Westfälischer Kunstverein, Münster, Germany (2010); Group exhibitions include: Palazzo Strozzi Fondazione, Florence, Italy (2013); Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (2013); Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2012); K21 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, Germany (2012, 2010)
 
Alicja Kwade received the Robert Jacobsen Prize in 2010 and the Piepenbrock Prize for Sculpture in 2008.
 
 
i8 Gallery
Tryggvagata 16
Reykjavik
Iceland
T: +354 551 36
 
i8 Gallery
 
Read On... i8 Gallery, Reykjavik

 

ANAT EBGI, Los Angeles

The Reader
Steel Fencing Company, 2013
Spray paint on fiberglass sign in found metal frame
12.5 x 18.5 inches
Courtesy of the artist and Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles
 
 
THE READER
Mixed Dealings
 
August 3 - 31, 2013
 
Anat Ebgi is pleased to present Mixed Dealings by The Reader. The exhibition will be on view until August 31st. A reception for the artist will be held on Saturday August 3rd from 3pm, at the gallery located at 2660 S. La Cienega Blvd, in Los Angeles.
 
Traveling repeatedly throughout the US, The Reader has quite literally made a name for himself that is there for all to see. Leaving a mass of public adornments for over a decade, Reader has maintained an illusiveness and anonymous presence in a desolate grey zone between so called "street art" and graffiti. In recent years Reader carried his oft-cryptic messages of literacy and inquiry into the gallery at the encouragement of his longtime friend Elias Hansen (Lawrimore Project, Seattle 2011).
 
A scavenger and "relocator" of the discarded and overlooked, Reader transforms untraceable detritus into the foundations of mixed media screen prints and sculptures. His workspace resembles a "byproduct chop-shop" more than it does a traditional artist's studio.
 
Characteristic of his work is the striking and recurrent use of text. Reader revives now nearly obsolete newspaper boxes and presents them in a context suggestive of ulterior purposes. The boxes themselves, isolated from their natural environment, appear to be salvaged by any available means. Scorched and mutilated they are newly employed by a rival enterprise. Metal sheets accented with both vibrant and weathered hues are welded together in a patchwork reminiscent of color field painting.
 
Both unavoidable and hidden amongst the layers, Reader's works are dealt through a range of materials. Some give clues to process and approach, others leave open a wide scope of interpretation, and all represent real work. That is the kind that is done outdoors and leaves one dirty. As the show title alludes to, Mixed Dealings is the result of a multifaceted discipline and uncertain means. Reader may not be hacking at establishment, as much as he is attempting to forge one anew.
 
Mixed Dealings is Reader's second exhibition with the gallery. In 2012, he collaborated with Elias Hansen on the two-person exhibition, We barely made it. Previous exhibitions include Lawrimore Projects, Seattle; Ditch Projects, Portland; White Box at the University of Oregon, Portland; and A Palazzo Gallery in Brescia, Italy. His work has been reviewed in Juxtapose Magazine, The Oregonian, and the Los Angeles Times.
 
 
ANAT EBGI
2660 La Cienega Boulevard
Los Angeles, CA 90034
T: +1 646 281 1112
 
ANAT EBGI
 
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Chisenhale Gallery, London

Photo: Cathy Hattersley
 
 
PRATCHAYA PHINTHONG
Broken Hill
 
26 July - 1 September 2013
 
Chisenhale Gallery presents a new commission by Bangkok based artist Pratchaya Phinthong for his first solo exhibition in the UK. Broken Hill explores the status of the replica ‘Broken Hill' skull in the collection of the Lusaka National Museum, Zambia and the displacement of the original to the Natural History Museum in London, examining how historical narratives are performed through objects.
 
The ‘Broken Hill' skull is the first early human fossil found in Africa and provided the primary evidence to support Darwin's theory of evolution, proposing humans as the natural descendants of primates. Discovered by Zambian miners in 1921, the skull was taken to London by the British colonial authorities. At the Natural History Museum it has been instrumental in the development of contemporary theories of human evolution, including research that has traced the origin of anatomically modern humans to sub-Saharan Africa.
 
Phinthong's interest lies in the replica skull, whose status as a fake is revealed to visitors to the Lusaka National Museum by one of the museum's guides, who, as part of his tour of the collection, narrates the story of the original skull's discovery and its subsequent removal. For his exhibition at Chisenhale Gallery, Phinthong has loaned the replica skull, replacing it with an identical model purchased online. He has additionally invited the museum guide, Kamfwa Chishala, to travel to London for the duration of the exhibition in order to relay the complex history of the skull to Chisenhale Gallery visitors, as he does in Lusaka.
 
This new commission develops from Phinthong's ongoing research in Africa, including Sleeping Sickness (2012) for dOCUMENTA (13) – attempting to counter a deadly disease, transmitted throughout Ethiopia, Tanzania and Zambia by the tsetse fly, with an ecological fly-trap produced by a Thai company and deployed by local people. Phinthong's often open-ended projects intervene in global social and economic structures and engage directly with geographical and social contexts. He uses established systems of exchange and equivalence – including the conceptual language of art – to highlight the materialisation and dematerialisation of value.
 
Although Broken Hill engages with discussion around the provenance of objects, Phinthong is primarily concerned with questions of human agency. The loan of the replica skull is the product of a fragile network of personal relationships across three continents, between individuals in Lusaka, Bangkok and London. By inviting the participation of Kamfwa Chishala, the Zambian museum guide, Phinthong opens the work up to the influence of Chishala's own biography and personal subjectivity. The implications of his intervention into the multiple narratives surrounding the ‘Broken Hill' skull play out into the future, extending the project beyond its existence as an artwork.
 
Pratchaya Phinthong (born 1974, Thailand) lives and works in Bangkok. Recent solo exhibitions include Pratchaya Phinthong, gb agency, Paris; Sleeping Sickness, Centre d'Art Contemporain, Rennes (both 2012); Give More Than You Take, GAMeC (Galeria d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea), Bergamo (2011) and CAC Brétigny (2010). Group exhibitions include Materials, Money and Crisis, MUMOK, Vienna; I Know You, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (both 2013); dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel; The Ungovernables, New Museum Triennial, New York; Modern Monsters / Death and Life of Fiction, Taipei Biennial (all 2012); Until it Makes Sense, Kadist Art Foundation, Paris and How to Work (More for) Less, Kunsthalle Basel (both 2011).
 
Pratchaya Phinthong's exhibition is supported by The Henry Moore Foundation, The Elephant Trust, Yana & Stephen Peel and Spring Workshop. With thanks to gb agency, Paris.
 
Chisenhale Exhibitions Partner 2013: Fiorucci Art Trust.
 
 
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