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ANNET GELINK GALLERY, Amsterdam

Wilfredo Prieto
Holy Water, 2009
Variable dimensions
Courtesy of Annet Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam
 
 
WILFREDO PRIETO
The Emperor's New Clothes
 
26 November 2011 - 21 January 2012
 
"... And so the emperor walked in the parade under a magnificent canopy and all the people in the street and behind the windows said: "O lord, how unparalled the emperor's clothes are, what a beautiful train his coat has! They fit like a glove!" No one wanted to show that he did not see anything, for then he would be no good for his position or would be very stupid. Never the emperor's clothes had been so successful." (Hans Christian Andersen, The Emperor's New Clothes, 1837)
 
Annet Gelink Gallery proudly presents its first solo exhibition by Wilfredo Prieto: The Emperor's New Clothes. Wilfredo Prieto (Sancti-Spiritus, Cuba, 1978) defies the boundaries of conceptual art with a group of new works which he brings together under the title of the well-known nineteenth-century fairy-tale of Hans Christian Andersen. With radical simplicity Prieto evokes questions about artistic intervention and the complexity of the everyday.
 
Just as in Andersen's fairy-tale Prieto gives a new meaning to - almost - invisible objects. The apparent emptiness of the exhibition room is interrupted by ready mades and some obscure elements. Just like two medicine bottles of which the one contains a venomous poison and the other the curing antidote, which cannot, however, be distinguished from each other. Literally all the media used are transparent: there is for instance a fish bowl and a crystal ball, there lies broken glass, a shower curtain and a small sparkling diamond. A leakage at the back of the exhibition on further reflection turns out to be a tears shedding ceiling.
 
Wilfredo Prieto's oeuvre is characterised by extreme minimalism, sarcasm and self-mockery. Ferran Barenblit, director of the CA2M in Madrid, describes Prieto's approach: 'Perhaps one of Wilfredo Prieto's cleverest tactics is his apparent invisibility in the relation between the work of art and the spectator.' In particular that neutral approach, the limited interference of the artist, enables the spectator to interpret his works in his own way. Barenblit: 'As the artist himself regularly says: "Ideas exist in the real world, just like clouds. You can see them and catch them". In a certain way Prieto reminds us of the fact that everyone could have done what he did'. Prieto allows the spectator a range of possibilities, 'a space of unprecedented richness, and this is what art makes a colossal and indispensable human activity.' (Ferran Barenblit, 'The Straightest Line', in: Wilfredo Prieto. Amarrado A La Pata De La Mesa, 2011.)
 
In The Emperor's New Clothes Prieto mercilessly wipes the floor with rashly following public opinion, the rules of society. He challenges the spectators to open up their own vision, just as the child in the fairy-tale who as only one dares to say: "But he doesn't wear anything!"
 
Wilfredo Prieto lives and works in New York. He studied at the Instituto Superior de Arte, Havana, and had residencies at Gasworks (London), Le Grand Cafe (St. Nazaire, France), John Simon Guggenheim Foundation (New York) and the Kadist Art Foundation (Paris). He had amongst others recent solo exhibitions at CA2M Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo in Madrid, S.M.A.K. in Ghent, Dia Art Foundation in New York, Kadist Art Foundation in Paris and Centro de Arte Contemporaneo Wilfredo Lam in Havana. His work was included in numerous group exhibitions, such as the 29th Sao Paolo Biennale (2010), I'm not here at De Appel Arts Centre (Amsterdam, 2010), Stowaways at the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts (San Francisco, 2009) and That was then, this is now at P.S.1 MoMA (New York, 2008). Wilfredo Prieto received the Cartier Foundation Award (Frieze, London, 2008) and the 2000 UNESCO Prize for the Promotion of the Arts (7th Havana Biennial, Group DUPP, Havana, 2000).
 
 
ANNET GELINK GALLERY
Laurierstraat 187-189
NL-1016 PL Amsterdam
Netherlands
T: 31 20 3302066
 
ANNET GELINK GALLERY
 
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ADN Galeria, Barcelona

Kendell Geers
Hellraiser
Installation view, ADN Galeria, Barcelona
 
 
KENDELL GEERS
Hellraiser
 
Exhibition curated by Pierre-Olivier Rollin and ADN Galeria
Opening on Friday, November 25th, 2011, at 7.30 p.m.
Exhibition from November 26th, 2011 to January 14th , 2012.
 
ADN Galeria will open on November 25th the solo show Hellraiser by Kendell Geers, curated by Pierre-Olivier Rollin, director of B.P.S.22 in Charleroi, Belgium, and ADN Galeria.
 
Kendell Geers’ work formulates a critical and iconoclast standpoint almost atypical in the contemporary artistic landscape. As the main line in his work, the notion of power comes out in representations that deal directly or metaphorically with issues like violence, religion, moral, sex, discipline and fear. Geers undermines the system of values set by our Western society and harshly reveals some aspects that are usually left in the dark: struggles for power, racism, coercion, injustice, exploitation of the weakest, feigned puritanism.
 
Far from the moralist, right-thinking tone that characterizes the so-called “political art”, Geers presents himself instead as a “terrorealist” (according to his own formula) who indecently exposes reality without distorting ideological filters. He doesn’t hesitate to use forms and expressions which provoke for their violence and their authoritarian or sexist character to unsettling the ideals of racial, ideological or religious purity. While relying on recurrent visual motives and humble materials (glasses stick on various supports, statues wrapped into the adhesive tape used by the police to circumscribe crime areas, black painting or ink dripping, construction materials), Geers’ works appear like signs that interfere and destabilize a system which legitimacy is based on the tacit omission of its dysfunctions.
 
As Pierre Olivier Rollin, curator of the exhibition observes: “in this exhibition, the artist will articulate some works realized in the last years along with his most recent production: drawings, sculptures, paintings, sculptural surfaces, installations, wall paintings. The exhibition synthesizes a series of concerns that have permeated the artist’s practice since his beginnings: the conjunction of extreme positions, the transformation of images and objects, the political reinterpretation of ready-made, minimalism and conceptual art, the alteration of senses, the aporia of language. Assembled in a large “cluster hanging”, works from various periods, media and expressive forms will compose an extended installation, increasing their levels of understanding. The works’ layout deliberately opens a multiplicity of interpretations that bring the works in their deep coherence and ramifications.”
 
The works exhibited at ADN surprise for its communicative efficiency: they are simple and determined, well structured and visually attractive. The aesthetic dimension of the works functions as a counter-weight for their provoking and violent contents. This ironically recalls us that violence is also “glamorous”, and produces fascination and addiction. The title of the exhibition, Hellraiser, plays with this dual vision of a figure that is desired just for being powerful and dangerous. A large wall painting takes the well-known “LOVE” pattern of Robert Indiana and turns it into a weaving of graphic signs to compose the Spanish coloquial word “COÑO”. The same impression of latent threat emanates from an installation composed by bricks suspended over the visitors’ head. Several sculptures in bronze reproduce some typical motives of Geers’ visual and symbolic field of references: religious, political or popular icons like the Belgian “Manneken Pis”, variations on African statues, daily objects with fingerprints or moldings of parts of the artist’s body. The display also includes a series of interventions on images appropriated from magazines and a new series of pornographic drawings that play with the voyeuristic condition of the spectator, who sees her/himself reflected on the support of the artworks.
 
The whole selection of pieces relies on black humor and obscenity; it shows the artist’s clear predilection for a bitter use of blaspheme and a smiling and caustic provocation. Language itself, as an essential component in Geers’ work, has a double face: the enigmatic phrases appearing in his drawings or painted on the walls hide standard words and concepts which have often been “stolen” from artistic or political discourses. Geers ill-treats and transforms language, aware of its ambivalence and properties to manipulate the public. Facing the works, the spectator has no other choice than confronting his/her own adhesion to this phantasmagoric script and his/her level of involvement and enjoyment.
 
Despite his iconoclastic tone, the artist’s expression is rarely univocal, since he keeps his own position ambiguous. Likewise, his biography and personal mythology follows the same scheme of ambivalence; from his identity as white man born and raised in South-Africa and militancy against the regime of the Apartheid, to his own decision to adopt 1968 as his symbolic date of birth, Geers exploits his personal history and constructs for himself a fictional character, while the discourses of the art establishment utilize these inputs to render, in turn, as a subversive icon.
 
 
ADN Galeria
c/ Enrique Granados, 49
SP-08008 Barcelona
Spain
T: +34 93 451 0064
 
ADN Galeria
 
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FRIEDRICH PETZEL GALLERY, New York

Robert Heinecken
Copywork
Installation view
2011
Friedrich Petzel Gallery
Image Courtesy of Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York
 
 
ROBERT HEINECKEN
COPYWORK
 
November 10 – December 22, 2011
 
Finally, you confound
the prim and the obscene
and show us function
 
of light and time
we dare not hurry
and cannot avoid.
 
I will say once
that your method is harsh
and your art tender.
 
Now let’s see you
get out of
that one?
 
- Marvin Bell from his poem “To Heinecken the Photographer,” 1975, Spain and Morocco
 
Friedrich Petzel Gallery is pleased to announce its first solo exhibition of works by Robert Heinecken. This exhibition will bring together iconic pieces, some of which are being exhibited for the first time.
 
Robert Heinecken has been called one of America’s most influential contemporary photographers, and yet he rarely used a camera. His definition of photography encompassed everything related to the photo; rather than focusing on the photographic image as a creation derived solely from a camera, his interest was on the relation of methods and formalism–often in an irreverent and humorous way–to popular media.
 
Heinecken’s artistic output examined the material possibilities of the medium, and created new methods to record and produce photographic objects using collage, lithography, Polaroid, silver gelatin prints, color processes, digital prints and experimental uses of darkroom chemistry. The nature of his output resists categorization, but he preferred, if any, the term paraphotographer, as a nod to the photographic processes he most frequently used.
 
Copywork will feature a full portfolio of one of the artist’s best-known works: the Are You Rea series (1964-1968). This series began as photograms of magazines and newspapers that were subsequently made into gelatin silver prints, and finally became an edition of lithographs. Are You Rea demonstrates Heinecken’s obsessive urge to process the same images in a multitude of ways, and directly addresses the artist’s affinity with Dadaism and Surrealism. The word “real” in an advertisement becomes the truncated “rea” in the photogram, and is intentionally pronounced “ray” to reference Man Ray’s “rayographs.” Each lithograph is revelatory in its juxtapositions of both copy and imagery from American advertising, exposing the mass media’s role in subconscious suggestion and promotion of capitalist consumption (sex, food, physical beauty). Heinecken considered pictures to represent manufactured experience, and wanted to expose the complicity in seemingly casual, everyday media imagery.
 
In addition to Are You Rea, the exhibition will showcase two iconic Polaroid works: Tuxedo Striptease (1984) and a selection from Heinecken’s Lessons in Posing series (1981-1982). Also on view will be lithographic films works, magazines, inkjet print reliefs, and standing figures and cut outs, terms that Heinecken employed to identify his life-size collaged figures of women, men, objects and animals juxtaposed into uncanny relationships.
 
Robert Heinecken’s work is currently on view in the two-person exhibition Speaking in Tongues: Wallace Berman and Robert Heinecken, 1961 – 1973 at the Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena, from October 2, 2011 – January 22, 2012. There is a catalogue forthcoming for this show, and the exhibition will subsequently travel to the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona, Tucson. In 2007, his work was the subject of a solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, and in 1999 a thirty-five-year retrospective was presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago that toured the same year to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. His works are in numerous public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. He was the founder of UCLA’s photography department in 1964 and taught there for thirty-one years, during which he lived in both Los Angeles and Chicago. Robert Heinecken was born in 1931 in Denver, Colorado and passed away in 2006 in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
 
A new monograph published by Ridinghouse is available. Please visit www.ridinghouse.co.uk for more information, or inquire at the gallery’s front desk.
 

 

FRIEDRICH PETZEL GALLERY
535 & 537 West 22nd Street
New York, NY 10011
T: +1 212-680-9467
 
FRIEDRICH PETZEL GALLERY
 
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MEYER RIEGGER, Berlin

Process, Time
Installation view
2011, Meyer Riegger Berlin
 
 
'Process, Time'
 
Katinka Bock, Björn Braun, Henrik Hakansson, John Miller, Helen Mirra, Jonathan Monk
 
November 12 - December 17
 
We are pleased to simultaneously present two group exhibitions "Time, Process” and “Process, Time” in our galleries in Karlsruhe and Berlin. Both exhibitions connect art works where time – taken as a moment in time – as well as its processuality play a vital role in the design of the particular works. In Berlin we present under the heading “Process, Time” works from Katinka Bock, Björn Braun, Henrik Hakansson, John Miller, Helen Mirra and Jonathan Monk. Mirra becomes the connection to our gallery in Karlsruhe: in the exhibition titled “Time, Process” not only Mirra’s works can be seen, but also those by Peter Dreher and Gabriel Vormstein. The media used by the artists such as painting, sculpture, installation, film and photography are building a framework for the process they are describing. The trace to mark the process of time, becomes equally effective for the content as well as for the materiality of the artistic description. When considered closely time and process seem like an antagonistic and a mutually induced couple likewise: Time and Process are conditions – but, however, they are conditions that elapse and in the course of their process negate and acknowledge each other. Time becomes productive, when thought of as a process and vice versa.
 
Henrik Hakansson refers to (natural) cycles with works, in which he equally adopts and effectively embeds those cycles. It is often fragments of nature that the artist transfers into a cultural context. Thereby he is creating almost surreal spatial structures. In the course of this Hakanssons moments of irritation seem like a subtle dialogue between man, nature and space. Plants, living creatures or their light and temperature induced changeability become the formative as well as the conceptual subject of his work. In our gallery space in Berlin the artist shows the work „Snail Drawing“: on seven sheets of paper we can see the paths of snails, that have been dipped into food coulouring before crossing the respective paper. Their trails become visible and remain as organic patterns on the paper. Each of the drawings is dated, whereby the distance covered by a snail marks the time from beginning to completion of the individual work.
 
Katinka Bock's sculptures and installations describe space by defining it as part of their materiality: her works formed out of stone, clay, sand, metal or fabrics allow for a narration that originates from the individual object as well as from the reference between the works and the so described structure of space. Along with including all elements the artist uses for the realization of her works fundamental characteristics like attraction, repulsion, expansion and contraction of mass. Bock intends the creation of connections, whereas the collaboration and the changing abilities of the sculpture and the space involve a determination of form that is characterized by reaction. Her works arise from encounters with concrete and on-going situations, which Katinka Bock translates into specifically materialistic and spatial proportions. In our Berlin gallery we present the installation “Kleine Kreise”. A seesaw-like construction consisting of a steel tube, a ceramic rod and a granite panel is held by an partially amorphously deformed ceramic tube. Blue bike tire tracks are crossing the tube and simultaneously encircles the sculpture which circulates between balance and disbalance.
 
Björn Braun's work results from a transformation process: in a synthesis of adding and removing the artist generates images, collages, objects and spatial complexes which circulate between a natural formation and an artistic creation. For Braun paper, wood, fibres and feathers become fundamentals that he puts into correspondence with literature, artificially produced textile fabrics or objects found in nature and that are put into a pictorial dialogue. By breaking-up or shifting the accustomed point of view Braun opposes his conceptual-minimalistic use of forms with an anarchistic gesture that transfers the figurative of his works towards abstraction. In the context of our exhibition in the gallery space in Berlin we present a wooden ladder of which Braun has removed footsteps and in a process lasting several days dissolved the woodfibres in water and finally made them into paper. In the exhibition the ladder corresponds with the picture that hangs on the opposite wall and enters a dialogue with the ladder as its medial conversion.
 
In his objects, paintings and texts the artist and author John Miller highlights different social desires and criticizes them metaphorically. In our space in Berlin we show an excerpt from his photographic project “Middle of the Day”, which John Miller has been pursuing continuously since 1994. The artist takes photographs in the afternoons between 12pm and 2pm at various places of different urban locations. The scenes – mostly people on their way through the city – are similar in their composition. However, all of the meanwhile 1600 pictures depicts one particular timeframe (the lunch break), that connects the free time with the working hours, which defines a time of the day that opens up for freedom but nevertheless heralds an evanescence with the restriction of this freedom. The passage-like excerpts show movement, distraction and stagnation alike, people in their consumerist behaviour and also urban landscapes exempted from their actors.
 
Jonathan Monks objects and installations iridescent between reminiscence, imagination and a specific condition. The artist attributes to the individual work a special temporality, which he questions at the same time – often in a humorous way. By comprising, well almost nostalgically archiving a (current) object of daily use, the artist undermines its function and usability. This can be seen in “The Odd Couple”, which we show in our Berlin gallery: two grandfather clocks facing each other whose time display is not readable due to the positioning of the clocks – ultimately their own impermanence becomes evident. In the course of the exhibition Jonathan Monk will realize an additional work: “Greta-Garbo-Straße 10”. The artist will have a wall piece built that is a reconstruction of the wall tiles of house number 10 of the Greta-Garbo-Straße in Berlin. The tiles will be put up on one of our gallery walls during the opening exhibition.
 
Helen Mirras works relate to a specific location with found – natural, cultural – products whose meaning she reformulates by adopting them and putting them into a narrative context. Photography, film, sound, language and textile fabrics stand in a conceptual dialogue with classic genres like sculpture, painting and drawing. By intertwining and dissolving materialities and categories the artist generates a minimalistic orientated picture and object language that is mostly accompanied by an abstract link between time and space: Mirra creates references to a reality that lies beyond her works and that comprises – her own – movement in space and time and conveys them as a snapshot into the exhibition setting. The works presented in our galleries in Berlin and Karlsruhe tie on Mirras exhibition “beforsten” in 2000 in our gallery in Karlsruhe, as well as her group of works “Field Recordings” (currently in the Bonner Kunstverein). Both group of works are preceeded by walks during which the artist choses objects like branches or stones found in the natural surroundings and ceates an on site China ink or oil print of those on canvas.They not only show abstract landscape contours in their imagery, but they are also a document of Mirras transition, that is divided into sequences, and her documentation of nature.
 
- Christina Irrgang (Translation: Teresa Schwarz)
 
 

MEYER RIEGGER
Friedrichstrasse 235
D-10969 Berlin
Germany
T: 49 030 315 665 80
 
MEYER RIEGGER
 
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KUCKEI + KUCKEI, Berlin

Installation view TEXT
Works by Kristján Gudmundsson, Hlynur Hallsson, Karlotta Blöndal
Courtesy of Kuckei + Kuckei, Berlin
 
 
TEXT
 
Until December 17
 
Birgir Andrésson
Dieter Roth
Gudny Rósa Ingimarsdóttir
Haraldur Jónsson
Hlynur Hallsson
Hreinn Fridfinnsson
Jóna Hlíf Halldórsdóttir
Jón Laxdal Halldórsson
Karin Sander
Karlotta Blöndal
Knut Eckstein
Kristján Gudmundsson
Lawrence Weiner
Libia Castro / Ólafur Ólafsson
Margrét Blöndal
Roni Horn
Sigurdur Gudmundsson
Unnar Örn Audarson
 
(Lat. textum: tissue, assemblage) decribes a definite, cohesive expression in writ-ten language by extension also the non-written, but possibly writable language information
 
Iceland is a nation of literature. It´s reputation as a Nation of literature has been internationally established ever since Reykjavik has being named „City of Literature“ from the UNESCO this summer. Based on the heritage of medieval literature consisting of the Sagas, the Edda or the Icelander Book this tradition reaches on into present days. The most published books per citizen proove the importance of the writ-ten word for Iceland and it´s culture. This peaks in Iceland beeing the guest of honour at this years Frankfurt Book Fair. The preservation, prevalence and impartation of literature became the great passion of the Icelanders. The logical chain leads to texts and references to literature being used in the works of icelandic artists. But also we discover these refereces in works of artists who are united by their affinity for icelandic culture.
 
The show TEXT curated by Hlynur Hallsson holds 19 icelandic and international artists who seek involvement with texts in their works. "Text" as vehicle gets displayed in various ways. Sometimes with astonishing honesty, sometimes naive and playful, sometimes in a poetic way, sometimes from a documentary point of view, sometimes even concealed or right in your face. For instance the references to literature to be found in the work by Roni Horn and Kristján Gudmundsson are directly tied to the theme but there are also works in the show which have a more conceptual to concrete orientation. What unites the works of the show is the utilization of texts as golden thread.
 
The exhibition "Text" is to be shown in a various form at National Gallery of Iceland in January 2012. With the friendly assistance of i8 Gallery, The Living Art Museum and National Gallery of Iceland, Reykjavik.
 
 
KUCKEI + KUCKEI
Linienstr. 158
D - 10115 Berlin
T: +49 (30) 883 43 54
 
KUCKEI + KUCKEI
 
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BRANCOLINI GRIMALDI, London

Massimo Vitali
Las Catedrales Waves, 2011
180 x 300 cm, C-print, Edition of 6
Courtesy of Brancolini Grimaldi, London
 
 
MASSIMO VITALI : NEW WORK
 
18 November 2011 – 28 January 2012
Press/Private View: Thursday 17 November, 7pm – 9pm
 
Massimo Vitali will unveil a striking new collection of photographs in his first UK solo exhibition since 1997 on 18 November at Brancolini Grimaldi.
 
Vitali has become one of the most celebrated contemporary photographers worldwide, renowned for his large colour prints depicting the crowded beaches and shorelines of the Mediterranean Sea. However, this new series focuses on the natural – rocks, cliffs, waterfalls, caves and quarries. Holidaymakers have been reduced to mere dots, hovering uncomfortably on the shore, or taking shelter in the shadow of monumental natural landmarks. Seen from such a distance, these crowds mimic colonies of mammals – huddles of seals or penguins - washed up on the rocks. The power of nature comes to the fore – in one image people are literally replaced by crashing waves as the tide moves in. Everything is now in flux and the old certainties have been washed away. Our frailty in the face of such power is thrown into focus and we are forced to confront our mortality and our inability to resist the forces of nature.
 
Vitali started his series of large format photographs at a specific moment in Italian history: 1994, the year in which Berlusconi came to power. He has said of this moment, “I wanted to look into the faces of the people that voted for Berlusconi and see if I could understand why. My photography comes from absolute matter-of-fact situations, but also from a deep curiosity that I possess for people, for what they do and how they think.” For Vitali, the beach was a place where the mundane and everyday merges with natural beauty, and where he could confront Italians in a place of vulnerability. The images reflect a sense of freedom, even hedonism, but also a sense of conformity and even banality. In the background, industrial buildings such as factories and warehouses loom, a reminder that the escape to nature is temporary and artificial.
 
Over the last 15 years, the subtle shift in Vitali’s work from crowds to sparsely populated landscapes, seems an attempt to understand how we can avoid colonising that which makes our environment meaningful and balanced, and an almost Romantic vision of the sublime power of nature.
 
Vitali was born in Como, Italy, in 1944. After studying photography at the London School of Printing he worked as a photojournalist in the early sixties and enjoyed a career in cinematography for television and cinema in the 1980s. His training in cinematography had a major influence on the way he approached photography when he returned to it in the mid 90s, particularly in the high level of technical precision he demanded in his image-making. After working with large format photography in 1993, Vitali commenced his series of Italian beach panoramas in 1995, coinciding with a period of dramatic political change in Italy. Since then he had major solo exhibitions around the world and his prints are included in various major international collections. Massimo Vitali currently lives and works in Lucca, Italy, and in Berlin, Germany.
 
Brancolini Grimaldi opened a new gallery in London in April 2011, expanding on its existing galleries in Rome and Florence. The gallery is dedicated to showcasing innovative artists who merge photography with other media such as performance, installation and video art. By introducing a more conceptual context to photography, it aims to redefine the future of the medium and the way it is displayed. Isabella Brancollini opened one of the first the first contemporary art galleries in Florence in 2002 showing a mixed programme of photography, painting, installation and video art. Camilla Grimaldi, who previously worked at Christie’s and White Cube, joined forces with Isabella in 2005 when the gallery became Brancolini Grimaldi Arte Contemporanea, opening a second space in the heart of Rome. They continue to run galleries in both Rome and London.
 
 
BRANCOLINI GRIMALDI
43 - 44 Albemarle Street
London W1S 4JJ
T: +44 (0)20 7493 5721
 
BRANCOLINI GRIMALDI
 
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YANCEY RICHARDSON GALLERY, New York

Sharon Core
1665, 2011
22 1/4 x 18 1/4 inches
Archival pigment print
Courtesy of Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York
 
 
SHARON CORE: 1606-1907
 
Until December 23, 2011
 
The Yancey Richardson Gallery is pleased to present 1606-1907,an exhibition of new works by Sharon Core exploring the subject of floral still-life painting. Similar to the artist’s earlier work, the seriesexamines the relationship of representational painting to the medium of photography. But rather than focusing on a specific artist or time period, as in the previous Thiebaud and Early American works, the new series references a pictorial convention within painting as a whole.  The artist’s sources range from the style of early Flemishpainters, such as Bosschaert and Jan Brueghel, to the Modernists Odilon Redon and Fantin-Latour.
 
The work engages time in both a sense of history and temporality. Flowers are the most temporal of objects: fragile, changeable, and short-lived, a flower’s bloom opens, bends, fades and falls according to degrees of light, temperature, water, and weather. It assumes its character from its atmosphere.  As a subject for art, however, flowers have been portrayed for centuries by artists of all stripes and have an established permanence in the lexicon of art history.
 
It is between these polarities of transience and permanence that the current work is situated. With an eye towards the flower in its natural state and as well as the styles of representation that attempt to order, organize, celebrate, and lament a fleeting symbol of beauty throughout history, Core hasthoroughly explored the nature of the painted bouquet.
 
In order for a photograph to be made, the subject must exist in real time and space. Unlike a painting, nothing can be idealized or imagined. As in previous work, Core made a detailed study of the manipulation of props: paint, light, and in this case, flowers. She cultivated specific types of flowers – brokenviral tulips, opium poppies, heirloom roses – and worked with them and their vagaries.
 
Sharon Core was born in New Orleans in 1965. She holds a BFA in painting from the University of Georgia and an MFA in Photography from Yale University. Her work is in the permanent collections of numerous museums, including the Guggenheim Museum,J. Paul Getty Museum, Yale University Art Gallery, Princeton Art Museum, Cleveland Museum of Art, and Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, among others.
 
 
YANCEY RICHARDSON GALLERY
535 West 22nd Street 3rd floor
New York, NY 10011
T: 1 646-230-9610
 
YANCEY RICHARDSON GALLERY
 
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LUIS DE JESUS, Los Angeles

Zackary Drucker and Amos Mac
"Distance is where the heart is, home is where you hang your heart, #5", 2011
Archival digital pigment print, edition of five, 24 x 36 in / 60.9 x 91.4 cm
Courtesy of Luis De Jesus Los Angeles
 
 
ZACKARY DRUCKER and AMOS MAC
Distance is where the heart is, home is where you hang your heart
 
December 10, 2010 - January 21, 2012
Artists Reception: Saturday, December 10, 6-9 PM
 
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is thrilled to announce an exhibition of new photographs by ZACKARY DRUCKER and AMOS MAC, titled “Distance is where the heart is, home is where you hang your heart”, opening Saturday, December 10, 2011, through January 15, 2012.
 
“Distance is where the heart is, home is where you hang your heart” is an intimate collaboration between two near-strangers - Zackary Drucker, the LA-based photographer, video and performance artist, and Amos Mac - the creator and publisher of Original Plumbing. Executed over a long, snowed-in Christmas weekend at Drucker's childhood home in Syracuse, New York, the images combine elements of personal history, performance documentation, and exhibitionism. The resulting intervention is also an experiment in cross-identity representation; a dialogue between Mac, a trans man, and Drucker, a trans woman. The exhibition marks the official release of this unique suite of 22 limited-edition photographs, a number of which appear in the first issue of Mac’s new publication, Translady Fanzine.
 
Keeping normative culture on the periphery, “Distance is where the heart is, home is where you hang your heart” explores the relationship between spectacle and voyeur as uniquely removed from the trappings of representational asymmetry. Veering between classically sleek fashion editorials to the sexed-up fetishism of Pierre Molinere, the site-specific body works of Ana Mendieta, and the transgressive body-as-target performances of Chris Burden, the photo essay imagines a stratagem where difference is grated into a fine dust settling over the ruins of normativity. Devoid of traditional male-female power dynamics, Mac and Drucker’s mutual bond and kinship as trans people results in a visual free-for-all that plays with sexuality, female subjection, power, wealth, vulnerability, victimization, family, comfort, safety, secrets - a perfect balance of voyeur and aesthete.
 
Drawing from feminist and queer theoretical discourse, Zackary Drucker’s work addresses sexual exploitation, transgender representation, and drag performance in order to explore relationships that facilitate queer/counter-cultural lineage. Interested in obliterating language obstacles, pulverizing identity disorders and revealing dark subconscious layers of outsider agency, her work reinvents and redistributes traditionally-held binary formulas and power relationships between spectacle and voyeur, dominator and subjugated, and the domesticated and exoticized.
 
Zackary Drucker earned an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 2007 and a BFA from the School of Visual Arts in 2005.  She has performed and exhibited her work internationally in venues including the 54th Venice Biennale (Swiss Off-Site Pavilion); Curtat Tunnel, Lausanne, Switzerland; L.u.c.c.a. Museum of Contemporary Art, Lucca, IT; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; REDCAT and LACE, Los Angeles; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA; Deitch Projects and Leo Koenig Inc. Projekte, New York; Steve Turner Contemporary, Los Angeles; and Jerome Zodo, Milan; among others.
 
Amos Mac is the creator, editor in chief, photographer and publisher of Original Plumbing, a celebrated female-to-male trans quarterly that was named Best Zine of 2010 in the San Francisco Bay Guardian's yearly readers' poll. Mac's voyeuristic, snap-shot styled photographs have been exhibited at galleries and events internationally, and his work has been published extensively in magazines, books, newspapers, and ad campaigns. Amos Mac holds a BS in Liberal Arts from The New School in New York City, where he lives and works.
 
 
LUIS DE JESUS Los Angeles
2685 S. La Cienega Boulevard
Los Angeles, CA 90034
T: +1 310-838-6000
E: gallery @ luisdejesus.com
Hours: Tuesday-Saturday, 10am-6pm
 
LUIS DE JESUS Los Angeles
 
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TANJA POL GALERIE, Munich

Wolfgang Burat
Robert Smith, The Cure, Cologne, 1980
b/w silvergelatine print, baryt, vintage
30,5 x 40,5 cm
Courtesy of Tanja Pol Galerie Munich
 
 
WOLFGANG BURAT
NO TEARS. PHOTOS 1980 – 1990
 
Until December 23
 
Tanja Pol Galerie is pleased to present NO TEARS. PHOTOS 1980 – 1990, a solo show by Wolfgang Burat. Born in 1955 in Osnabrueck, Germany, Wolfgang Burat now lives and works in Cologne.
 
In 1980 Burat was a co-founder of the renowned legendary music magazine SPEX, and over the following decade (1980-90), he photographed musicians, bands, artists, concerts, backstage situations and fans for the magazine. NO TEARS presents a selection of unique vintage prints. It comprises intimate portraits of musicians such as Freddy Mercury, Martyn Ware/Heaven 17, David Byrne/Talking Heads, Nikki Sudden, Afrika Bambaataa, Paul Weller, Robert Smith/The Cure, Linton Kwesi Johnson, David Thomas/Pere Ubu, Kraftwerk or Archie Shepp.
 
Burat's photographic gaze set the visual impact of this important magazine, and his oeuvre depicts a scene that is of utmost importance for many contemporary (visual) artists, for social and music history, pop theory and art history.
 
Tanja Pol Galerie represents the Wolfgang Burat Archive, which consists of around 2000 vintage prints, mostly on PE and baryt paper, and mostly unique.
 
 
TANJA POL GALERIE
Ludwigstrasse 7
80539 Munich
T: +49 89 18946486
 
TANJA POL GALERIE
 
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BAUKUNST GALERIE, Cologne

M+M
Videostill from Monday, 2011
2 channel Videoinstallation
16 mm on HD, synchronised
Color, sound, ca. 3 min.
 
 
M + M
Sunday Monday
 
18 November, 2011 - 13 January, 2012
Opening Thursday, the 17th of november 2011 from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m.
 
Introduction:
Dr. Sabine Maria Schmidt
curator and Author, Dusseldorf
 
"Sunday Monday" is the third great solo exhibition at the Baukunst Galerie with the artist duo M+M (Marc Weis and Martin De Mattia). The two video installations “Sonntag” and “Montag” initiate a “seven-day-series”; they are shown together with asymmetric montages.
 
The project “seven-days” is based on the idea of a movie-series and corresponds to key scenes and dialogues of well-known cult movies which are re-interpreted by the artists. Every day of the week is dedicated to a movie, which is presented as a 2-channel film installation.
 
Christoph Luser is the protagonist in every film, while the other roles will be played by changing actors. Luser can be regarded as a guiding line within the whole series, which is characterized through changes and variations.
 
"Monday" uses the equally entitled scene in Standley Kubriks movie “The Shining” (1980). Through specific close-ups and ascending tenseness in the dialogues the seemingly everyday scenes are being increasingly perceived as alarming. A father-daughter scene is contrasting a husband-wife projection. “Sonntag” refers to the opening scene of Jean Godard´s “Le Mépris” (1963) and portraits a bored couple in bed. The projection of a father with his daughter in the same situations constitutes a counterpoint. By using two identical scenes with different combinations, the work seeks to address questions of mens´ complex role in the family. In doing so, it explores the possibilities and limitations of male identity. In both double-stagings the analogue rhythm of language and image emerges a strange and awkward atmosphere for the audience. The content of the other scene affects automatically the increasing tenseness and will be transferred to the man or the women or the child. This scene has to be interpreted by the beholder. Violence, incest or paedophilia can not be excluded. However, these cannot be ruled out in second thinking and associating. By keeping the situation and the „loop“ open, space and time are intangible and are lost in discontinuity.
 
Photographies from the nascent movies “Samstag” (“Saturday Night Fever”) and “Donnerstag” (“Franziskus”) which are assembled asymmetrical by two film stills are going to be exhibited. The character of a collage can not be seen on first sight. A closer look identifies where the film stills are assembled. Furthermore, there are montages on display of “Sonntag” and “Montag” as well as from the 4-channel installation “Schlagende Wetter”, which was produced for the exhibition project EMSCHERKUNST.2010. The expression “Schlagende Wetter” comes from the mining terminology and is designated to the explosive reaction of air and mine gas. Here it is seen as a metaphor for interpersonal tensions.
 
The subject of psychological density and emotions are changing permanently – They can be found in all works of the exhibition.
 
The recent photo works (250 x 130 cm and 120 x 160 cm) have monumental formats, which resembles dream sequences. They get closer to the events through a new display and production format of expression, which did not exist in earlier works. Thereby M+M include the beholder emotionally in film and photography. Dealing with the subject of time is an important aspect. On the one hand it is shown in the video installations as a successive process. On the other hand it is presented in the montages as “time-pictures” of simultaneity.
 
In 2006 M+M gained a three month “artists in residence“ -scholarship at the Villa Aurora, Los Angeles. This had been preceded by an USA-scholarship of the Bavarian State in 2002, a scholarship of the Villa Massimo in Rome and a grant through the Bavarian Council in 1997. Furthermore, in 2008 M+M received a visiting professorship at the Behrens School of Architecture in Düsseldorf, in 2001-02 a teaching position at the Hochschule für Gestaltung und Kunst in Zurich and one year before a visiting professorship at the Academy of Arts in Munich. The works of the artist duo were already presented in several major national and international exhibitions, amongst others in the Italian Pavilion of the Venice Biennale, the ZKM Karlsruhe, Folkwang Museum Essen, the Pergamon Museum Berlin, the Sprengelmuseum Hannover, the Kunstmuseum Bern, the Museum Ludwig Cologne and the Musée d’Art Contemporain Montreal.
 
 
BAUKUNST GALERIE
Theodor-Heuss-Ring 7
D – 50668 Cologne
T: +49-(0)221-771 33 35
 
BAUKUNST GALERIE
 
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