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Galerie Eva Presenhuber: MARK HANDFORTH - TWO OLD BANANAS and KAREN KILIMNIK - 22 Mar 2013 to 18 May 2013 Current Exhibition |
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MARK HANDFORTH
TWO OLD BANANAS March 22 2013 - May 18 2013 |
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MARK HANDFORTH TWO OLD BANANAS March 22 2013 - May 18 2013 Galerie Eva Presenhuber is delighted to present new works by Miami-based British artist Mark Handforth in the exhibition «Two Old Bananas». Mark Handforth is a familiar name in the Zurich art scene, thanks not only to his previous exhibitions at Galerie Eva Presenhuber in 2006 and 2008, but also to his 2005 solo exhibition at the Kunsthaus. In 2007 he caused something of a sensation in Zurich when he installed a large-format sculpture made from welded chain links on Tessiner Platz at the city’s Enge railway station. In his third show at Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Mark Handforth broadens his formal scope with new sculptures that incorporate organic shapes rather than referring to urban living spaces. Cast in aluminum, the eponymous two bananas lean against each other. The viewers actively become part of the work, their bodies dwarfed by the sheer magnitude - over three meters high - of the shimmering metal fruit. A pair of cashew nuts locked together in a close embrace also manipulates our perception, for the bronze Love Nuts bring to mind two indefinable primitive organisms caught in the act of reproducing whatever their species might be. Meanwhile the bronze cast of SEAL shows the last step of a transformational process from an actual seal to a pocket-size rubber toy (which provided the model for the cast) to a work of art whose dimensions, material, and position register a radical shift away from the original. Handforth’s deliberately minimalist range of materials—he mainly uses industrially produced metal and neon tubes—is supplemented in this exhibition by lighting from lightbulbs and daylight. Whereas three-dimensional neon works such as Eclipse (shown in 2003 at Consortium, Dijon) or Western Sun (shown in 2004 at the Whitney Biennial) clearly reference Minimal Art and artists like Dan Flavin, his work The Library presents a new take on the visual arts’ age-old exploration of light and shadow: a wire mesh cylinder that contains a glowing lightbulb hangs from a gallows-like geometric sculpture made of aluminum joists. The streetlamp, a frequent ready-made motif in Handforth’s works, is transformed into a more or less domestic DIY object shedding light, so to speak, on the issues and formal vocabularies central to art history. Handforth’s wall piece Caviar Phone provides a contrast to the solid mass of the sculptures by incorporating the architecture of the exhibition space. Holes drilled directly into the longitudinal wall of the gallery and painted with spray paint and ink form a three-meter high telephone receiver. Further holes spreading away from the receiver across the entire wall suggest a process of dissolution. As the holes are lit by daylight, the sculpture ceases to exist once evening falls. Glimpses of the outside world and everyday life that are visible through the holes draw attention to the boundaries of the exhibition space while at the same time challenging the notion of the sculpture as a tangible object and augmenting the visibility of the artistic intervention in situ. Mark Handforth refers to late twentieth-century art movements such as Minimal Art and Pop Art as languages that he has learned to speak, and he is grateful to be able to switch between several languages in one and the same sentence. In this sense, this exhibition, in which autonomous sculptures enter into a dialogue with one another, reveals Handforth as an eloquent multilingual voice-artist who narrates our own history within an artistic context. Mark Handforth (born in Hong Kong in 1969) lives and works in Miami. Parallel to the exhibition at Galerie Eva Presenhuber his work Horseshoes is on display in the cloisters of Cluny Abbey and the monumental open-air sculpture L’Etoile de Bagnolet is permanently installed on the Place de la Porte de Bagnolet in Paris. Selected solo exhibitions: Rolling Stop (Knight Exhibition Series), Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami (2011); MCA Chicago Plaza Project, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2011); Hessel Museum of Art, New York (2011); Kunstnernes Hus (with Urs Fischer and Georg Herold), Oslo, Norway (2009); Dallas Museum of Art, Concentrations 51, Dallas (2007); Kunsthaus, Zurich, Switzerland (2005); Le Consortium, Dijon (2003); UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2002). For further information please contact Tobias Steinle at Galerie Eva Presenhuber. KAREN KILIMNIK April 6 2013 - May 18 2013 Opening on Friday, April 5, 6-8 pm Löwenbräu-Areal, Limmatstr. 270, 8005 Zurich Galerie Eva Presenhuber is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Karen Kilimnik, featuring for the first time a major group of photography. The American artist, who has been represented by Eva Presenhuber since 1995, became known in the early nineties. Following major overview exhibitions at the ICA, Philadelphia (2006), the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago (2008), the ARC in Paris (2006), and the Serpentine Gallery in London (2007), she is currently preparing a promising show for Zurich, the core of which will be an installation-based presentation of a ballet titled "Sleeping Beauty + Friends", which she has helped choreograph, and which premiered at the New Players Theatre in London in 2007. Also on view will be new oil paintings, drawings, and objects, carefully arranged in a spatial situation that the artist will be creating specially for this Zurich show. This setting, which can be entered through a classicist-like doorway, will be complemented by a large series of photographic works. With her obsessive oeuvre, Karen Kilimnik has been evoking a world saturated by seemingly trivial desires and longings since her early years. The glamour of fashion serves just as much as a means of projection as do TV series, the rainbow press, or the world of ballet: hovering students, dying swans, or dead squirrels are suitable protagonists for her art, which is filled with girls' dreams. In her drawings, Karen Kilimnik combines beauties traced from magazines with lifted quotations, and her own, sometimes quite caustic comments. Her oil paintings, by contrast, appear rather traditional, except that they tell of a sense of tradition that the artist does not derive from her reflection on the art of the past, but from the popularized repertoire of the media industry. While producing her paintings, Karen Kilimnik appropriates seemingly romantic landscapes, castles, and pedigree dogs. For the exhibition at Galerie Eva Presenhuber Karen Kilimnik will be showing a smaller group of new paintings within the unique setting of a wallpaper installation. This wallpaper installation was completely hand painted in a specialized wallpaper workshop including specific elements and motifs taken from Karen Kilimnik’s own world of painterly imagination. This small world in it's own is surrounded by a large group of over one hundred of her no less memorable sensitive photographs. The photographs show sceneries from Central Park, english landscapes, little snow piles, film and television stills or shop windows with jewellery displays. What makes them sensational is the fact that they spot the media fantasies that characterize Karen Kilimnik's motifs outside the realm of fiction, within a, as it seems, authentic reality. The American artist has left her mark on art history both with her way of taking pictures and her succinct, obsessive installations: She uses striking props and open-mindedly assembles finds, cheap decoration material, and luxury furnishings to form powerful images. |
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