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Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing-Lucerne: Bachmann/Banz, Helter Skelter - Painting with the Beatles - 19 Jan 2008 to 29 Mar 2008 Current Exhibition |
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Bachmann/Banz, "Rocky Raccoon" 2007, oil on canvas, 210 x 170 cm
Courtesy: Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing-Lucerne |
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All of the paintings on display at this exhibition by Caroline Bachmann and Stefan Banz have been created exclusively for Galerie Urs Meile in Lucerne. The artists have taken images from their own private photo collection, as well as from the Internet, films, books, and magazines, and adopted, entangled and displaced political, societal and cultural motifs (both familiar and unfamiliar) to create their very own "cover versions." These new versions break free from the original images both visually and with regard to content: their significance, as well as their fields of associations change in the altered contexts. The Beatles served to inspire the artist duo to this form of usurpation, and, therefore, all of the displayed works bear the title of one of the group's well-known songs. The dimensions of the paintings at the exhibition are predominantly 52 x 63 cm / 63 x 52 cm, but four of their so-called "Large Format Bonus Paintings" are also on display, which serve to structurally define the exhibition. All of the paintings are mounted within special custom-made frame constructions, which give them the appearance of freestanding sculptures. The large-format painting Rocky Raccoon (oil on cotton, 210 x 170 cm), for instance, is mounted into a wooden box (217 x 177 x 33 cm), which could be either a transportation crate or a cabinet, but is also reminiscent of a folding altarpiece at a cathedral. When the piece is hung on the wall (opened or closed), it is just like Pandora's "box." When the cabinet is open, one painting with portraits of Lee Harvey Oswald and Greta Garbo is revealed. The injured face of Garbo is based on a small photographic work by Douglas Gordon, and the portrait of Oswald captures the very moment of his arrest, two days before he was shot by Jack Ruby. What connects these two very different personalities with each other? And what do the injuries of the protagonists have to do with the fact that the painting can be locked away? The paintings on display allow for a vast array of different meanings, which is very much comparable to our contemporary mechanisms of perception. At the same time, these works of art are marked by both conceptual and figurative homogeneity. They vehemently and explicitly, but also with a fair amount of indifference and self-deprecation call for an interpretation: the means of representation, as well as the significance and meaning of depiction in art, become the very subjects of their study. In I Am The Walrus, for instance, Mozart's skull (Mozarteum Collection, Salzburg) is attached to the body of a corpulent and lazy dog at rest. Happiness Is A Warm Gun, on the other hand, is a portrait of Petr Ginz, a victim of the Holocaust, who as a young Jewish boy at Auschwitz kept an illustrated diary. The government of the Czech Republic turned one of his drawings into a stamp in January of 2005. In Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds, a birch tree that has lost its leaves glows in the night. Sexy Sadie shows Helmut Berger (the son) and Ingrid Thulin (the mother) in an intimate scene from Luchino Visconti's film "The Damned" (1969), but the actors are unrecognizable due to the heavy backlighting. And then, in Revolution, Superman is ready to save the world, but in the background, on the roof of a skyscraper, there is a scarecrow dressed like a cowboy. In Carry That Weight, a melting iceberg swims surreally above and below the water's surface. And in Across The Universe, Darth Vader is shown giving an interview. In Working Class Hero (305 x 400 cm), Andy Warhol, wearing sunglasses and toting a sports bag, admires the Great Wall of China as a projection, an image or an actual view. And then there is Golden Slumbers, which captures a view through the peepholes in Marcel Duchamp's installation entitled "Etant donn�s: 1. La chute d�eau, 2. Le gaz d��clairage..." (1946-1966, Philadelphia Museum of Art). Caroline Bachmann and Stefan Banz reside on the shores of Lake Geneva, only three kilometers away from "Le Forestay," the waterfall that Marcel Duchamp photographed in 1946, and which became a point of departure for his last great work. In the center of the large exhibition hall in Lucerne stands last but not least Here Comes The Sun, a monumental sculpture of a tone-arm that has a paintbrush instead of a gramophone pick-up. Its unusual realization and oversized status (150 x 750 x 210 cm) make it an abstract and surreal figure. A full-color 48-page publication the size of a CD case accompanies the exhibition. It includes 38 images of all the paintings on display, as well as an essay written by the artists on their work. It was published by the Galerie Urs Meile in 2007. Translation: Gunilla Zedigh |
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