- ARCHIVE / AUTHOR ARCHIVE
Valentin Carron at Palais de Tokyo
Artist: Valentin Carron
Venue: Palais de Tokyo, Paris
Exhibition Title: Pergola: Monsieur
Date: February 19 – May 16, 2010
Full gallery of images, press release and link available after the jump.
Images:
Images courtesy of Palais de Tokyo. Photos by André Morin.
Press Release:
1916: Le Corbusier builds a « Villa Turque » (Turkish Villa), the Villa Schwob, flanked by a pergola, in La Chaux-de-Fonds (Switzerland). Some years later, he publishes photos of it in L’Esprit Nouveau. On the ground, in front of the villa, a white smear betrays retouching: the pergola has disappeared. Less than a century later, the Iraqi journalist Muntazer Al-Zaïdi throws his shoes at George W. Bush’s head.
Poltergeists are on the agenda at PERGOLA. Against the background of a haunted modernity, silhouettes of erased lives demand restitution: Swiss tavern lanterns cast a gloom over the museum space, the ventilation shafts bring back good memories of monumental architecture, the melancholy of the Renaissance seeps into this no man’s land, pneumatic dispatch breaches communication…. In the public spaces, the forsaken demand equal treatment in the art works by Charlotte Posenenske. This is the opportunity to discover for the first time the works of this important German artist, alongside the art objects of Valentin Carron, Raphael Zarka, Serge Spitzer, and the large shoe of the Iraqi Laith Al-Amiri.
On his way from vernacular iconography to religious symbols, passing through pastiches of public spaces, Valentin Carron interrogates identities through the forms that they celebrate. By invoking these archetypes, the artist doesn’t give in to forgeries, imitation, or even simple reproductions. Seemingly displaced, fragmented and multiplied, his works are either synthetic, serial, or monumental; since they have cashed in on minimalist abstraction, they are freed from a single and unchanging viewpoint.
Here, he uses humour to hijack objects, images, symbols, and their popular usages. Imagery from modern art as well as traditional and contemporary folklore redeploy under a regime of falsehoods, with the candour of a roundabout sculpture. The lanterns evoke either a fanciful Switzerland with mountains and chalets or a heavenly Midwest with wooden sculptures, natural parks, and amusement parks. All these works oscillate between the celebration and the criticism of a romantic and wild country—an elaborate myth that moulds a nation. But even though he plays with notions of authenticity, the handmade, the readymade, and the kitsch aesthetic, Valentin Carron holds out against all ideologies. Or rather, he gives in to all of them: he “poaches” in the matrix of popular consumer culture. Through his works, collective memory becomes a monument that glorifies each of our lives.
[1977] Born in Fully (Switzerland). Lives and works in Martigny (Switzerland).
Amelie von Wulffen at Crone
Artist: Amelie von Wulffen
Venue: Crone, Berlin
Exhibition Title: Bitte keine heiße Asche einfüllen
Date: February 6 – March 6, 2010
Full gallery of images and link available after the jump.
Images:
Images courtesy of Galerie Crone, Berlin
“ars viva 09/10″ at Kölnischer Kunstverein
Artists: Mariana Castillo Deball, Jay Chung & Q Takeki Maeda, Dani Gal
Venue: Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne
Exhibition Title: ars viva 09/10 Geschichte/ History
Date: February 20 – April 4, 2010
Full gallery of images, press release and link available after the jump.
Images:
Images courtesy of Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne. Photos by Simon Vogel.
Press Release:
The Kölnischer Kunstverein is delighted to be able to present this year’s prestigious ars viva prize exhibition on the theme of History. The Kulturkreis der deutschen Wirtschaft im BDI e.V. (Cultural Circle of German Industry in the BDI, reg. charity) awarded the ars viva prize for visual arts of € 5,000 each to Mariana Castillo Deball (b. 1975), Jay Chung and Q Takeki Maeda (b. 1976/77), and Dani Gal (b. 1975). Three exhibitions (in the Museum Wiesbaden, in the Kölnischer Kunstverein and in the migros museum für gegenwartskunst in Zurich) in the series ars viva are linked to the promotional prize, and these will be accompanied by a catalogue in two languages and an artist’s edition. The three prize-winners were chosen from 44 artists in whose work the investigation of the construction of historical facts is of central importance.
It is striking that all the prize-winning artists engage in their work with the question of the construction of history, how and why it comes to be used today in the political but also the economic sphere. They concentrate in their works on the historical document as the smallest common factor on which, seen from today, agreement can be reached.
Mariana Castillo Deball was born 1975 in Mexico City and studied in Mexico City and Maastricht. In her installations and films the artist often links the dates of historical found objects with fictions of her own, in this way creating a fantastic polyphony in the representation of historical facts. The architecture of an archaeological museum can just as easily become material in her hands as a documented error in economic history. By treating both in her personal aesthetic idiom and skilfully analysing them, she gives the ponderous historical material a lightness that directs the viewer’s gaze to aspects of them that are seemingly peripheral or absurd yet always form part of the construction of history.
Jay Chung and Q Takeki Maeda were born respectively in 1976 in the USA and in 1977 in Japan and studied at Yale, Berkeley, Tokyo and Frankfurt/Main. With conceptual acuteness and a good measure of humour the work of the two artists examines the extent to which the fetishism of today’s consumer world and the universal possibility for anyone to appear in the mass media raises issues of originality and fakery. In doing so the two artists, who are constant performers of their own work, look at how a leading international handbag manufacturer misrepresents historical facts in order to create its own myth, as well as scrutinizing the shoddy construction of reproduction furniture.
Dani Gal was born 1975 in Israel and studied in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Frankfurt/Main and New York. In his work the artist investigates the construction of history in the media in the post-war years. He approaches this principally through sound and by examining the question of how the documentation of a historical event relates to the direct experience of that event. How does sound alter our perception of facts? The artist has worked on the recent history of Israel, for example with a re-enactment of the first television broadcasts by the national TV station, as well as with a quasi documentary approach to the legendary musical producer Lee Perry.
The jury, under the chairmanship of Dr. Arend Oetker, this year consisted of curators Dr. Volker Rattemeyer and Dr. Jörg Daur (Museum Wiesbaden), Kathrin Jentjens and Anja Nathan-Dorn (Kölnischer Kunstverein), Heike Munder (migros museum für gegenwartskunst in Zurich) and Dr. Yilmar Dziewior (Kunsthaus Bregenz), Christiane Mennicke (Kunsthaus Dresden) and six members of the arts committee of the Kulturkreis.
The ars viva exhibition ran from 11.10.2009 to 17.1.2010 at the Museum Wiesbaden. The exhibition then moves to the Kölnischer Kunstverein, after which it will run from12.6. to 15.8.2010 in the migros museum für gegenwartskunst in Zurich.
ars viva 09/10 Geschichte/ History – An exhibition of the award winners visual arts of Kulturkreis der deutschen Wirtschaft im BDI.
Daido Moriyama at Luhring Augustine
Artist: Daido Moriyama
Venue: Luhring Augustine, New York
Date: February 13 – March 13, 2010
Full gallery of images, press release and link available after the jump.
Images:
Images courtesy of Luhring Augustine, New York
Press Release:
Luhring Augustine is pleased to present its first exhibition featuring the work of Daido Moriyama, one of Japan’s leading figures in photography. Witness to the spectacular changes that transformed postwar Japan, his photographs express a fascination with the cultural contradictions of age-old traditions that persist within modern society. Providing a harsh, crude vision of city life and the chaos of everyday existence, strange worlds, and unusual characters, his work occupies the space between the objective and the subjective, the illusory and the real.
Moriyama takes pictures with a small hand-held camera that enables him to shoot freely while walking or running or through the windows of moving cars. Taken from vertiginous angles or overwhelmed by close-ups, his blurred images are charged with a palpable and frenetic energy that reveal a unique proximity to his subject matter. Snapshots of stray dogs, posters, mannequins in shop windows, and shadows cast into alleys present the beauty and sometimes-terrifying reality of a marginalized landscape. His anonymous and detached approach enables him to capture the “visible present” made up of accidental and uncanny discoveries as he experiences them.
Moriyama emerged as a photographer in the 1960’s at the tail end of the VIVO collective, a revolutionary and highly influential group of Japanese artists who reexamined the conventions of photography during the tumultuous postwar period. William Klein’s loose, Beat style images of New York City in the 1960s also served as a major turning point for Moriyama, who found inspiration in Klein’s free-form photographic style. Taken by these innovative approaches at home and abroad, Moriyama ultimately went on to forge his own radical style.
“Hawaii”, Moriyama’s most recent body of work, was produced over a period of three years and presents his distinct perspective on the daily lives of the people living on the islands of Hawaii and Oahu. Returning to the island five times before feeling prepared to shoot these surroundings, Moriyama’s overall approach is purposeful and considered despite his loose and informal style. The series was recently exhibited at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography and published in a volume by the institution.
Daido Moriyama was born in Osaka in 1938. He has had museum shows around the world including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland, the Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain, Paris and the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography. His work is part of many major public collections such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Centre Pompidou, Paris, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Los Angeles County Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the Getty in Los Angeles.
Week in Review: March 7, 2010
Welcome to Week in Review, our Sunday round-up of the last 7 days of activity here at Contemporary Art Daily.
This week’s featured exhibitions:
Bernd and Hilla Becher at Konrad Fischer
Oscar Tuazon at Kunsthalle Bern
Ann Veronica Janssens at Alfonso Artiaco
Thomas Eggerer at Daniel Buchholz
Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster at Dia at the Hispanic Society
Be sure to e-mail us with any tips, observations or complaints and comment on the shows you feel strongly about. Have an excellent week.
Mark Grotjahn at Blum and Poe
Artist: Mark Grotjahn
Venue: Blum and Poe, Los Angeles
Exhibition Title: Seven Faces
Date: February 27 – April 3, 2010
Full gallery of images, press release and link available after the jump.
Images:
Images courtesy of Blum and Poe, Los Angeles. Installation views by Joshua White. Individual works photographed by Douglas Parker.
Press Release:
Blum & Poe is pleased to present our fifth solo exhibition of work by Mark Grotjahn.
The exhibition is entitled, “Seven Faces” and will include up to twelve new paintings from Grotjahn’s “face” series.Visually reminiscent of Picasso, Grotjahn’s “face” paintings intermingle abstract and figurative renderings while dismantling and building on the conventions of modern and contemporary painting. Using sheets of cardboard that are primed and mounted on linen as the ground, Grotjahn employs brush and palette knife to extensively build layer upon layer of oil paint to almost sculptural ends. Working in varying scales, combinations of texture, lines, color and abstracted geometric shapes develop into representational eyes and noses that are broken down, multiplied, and rearranged, fracturing any fixed perspective. Other paintings possess networks of expressive lines formed strictly with a palette knife and rest on the verge of non-objective abstraction. Both the gestural and literal carvings cut up the painting and further adds to the tension between illusionistic space and the reality of the paintings’ physical surface. The seemingly idiosyncratic “face” paintings are like their counterparts, his abstract and systematic perspectival-based “butterfly” paintings, simultaneously mimetic and expressive, but arrive at this balance in reverse order. These new ritualistically repetitive and intensely textured paintings point to Grotjahn’s implicit observations of and evolution in the practice of painting.
Mark Grotjahn has exhibited widely internationally, a selection of venues includes the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands (2008); Museum of Modern Art, New York (2008, 2006, and 2005); the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2008 and 2005); Kunstmuseum Thun, Switzerland (2007); Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, CO (2007), and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY (2006). Grotjahn belongs to numerous public collections, such as the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Walker Art Center; Minneapolis, MN; Los Angeles County Museum, Los Angeles; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Grotjahn was included in the 54th Carnegie International in 2004 and the Whitney Biennial in 2006. Mark Grotjahn lives and works in Los Angeles.
A fully illustrated catalogue will be produced on the occasion of this exhibition.
Tony Just at Sommer & Kohl
Artist: Tony Just
Venue: Sommer & Kohl, Berlin
Date: February 27 – April 17, 2010
Full gallery of images, press release and link available after the jump.
Images:
Images courtesy of Sommer & Kohl, Berlin
Press Release:
Sommer & Kohl are pleased to present the first solo exhibition with new works by Tony Just (*1969, USA).
“The ways in which people see and how they then interpret what they see are themes I think about when working. This exhibition of paintings includes images based on a graffiti of a dripping eye, the original ten images of the Rorschach test, and the character Rorschach from the comic book series Watchmen.
Using elements of abstraction, representation, illustration and duplication I try to produce paintings which show the infinite possibilities of interpretation. The magic of seeing images revealed or dissolved. To move the viewer just a little bit closer to seeing something they may have missed.“ Tony Just
Starting point for Tony Just’s exhibition is a graffiti of a dripping eye that was tagged around New York City. He takes up this image with an interest in its symbolic as an archetypal talisman to ward off evil or envy, used in many Mediterranean cultures.
Other works are based on the 1980s graphic novel Watchmen, featuring superhero characters no longer allowed to do their work. One of the main characters is Rorschach, a psychopathic vigilante who wears a white mask containing a symmetrical but constantly shifting ink blot pattern. Rorschach went underground and continued fighting crime from there. The story reflects contemporary anxieties and skips through space, time and plot, classifying itself as a nonlinear narrative.
Another important impetus for the paintings is the Rorschach test itself. It is used to examine personality characteristics and emotional functioning by recording and analyzing a subjects’ perception of ten different inkblots.
Tony Just’s works will be included in the exhibition The Berlin Box, curated by Friederike Nymphius, at CCA Andratx Art Foundation in Mallorca from 3 April to 31 October 2010. Recent solo exhibitions took place at Galerie Maisonneuve in Paris and Gavin Brown’s enterprise in New York. Tony Just’s work is featured in Bob Nickas’ new publication Painting Abstraction: New Elements in Abstract Painting, published by Phaidon Press, London.
Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster at Dia at the Hispanic Society
Artist: Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster
Venue: Dia at the Hispanic Society, New York
Exhibition Title: chronotopes & dioramas
Date: September 23, 2009 – June 27, 2010
Full gallery of images, press release and link available after the jump.
Images:
Images courtesy of Dia Art Foundation at the Hispanic Society, New York. Photos by Cathy Carver.
Press Release:
Dia Art Foundation is pleased to announce chronotopes & dioramas, a new project by Paris- and Rio de Janeiro based artist Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster. For this site-specific project, the third in a series of contemporary art exhibitions commissioned by Dia for The Hispanic Society of America, Gonzalez-Foerster takes as her point of departure the Hispanic Society’s internationally renowned research library. On view September 23, 2009 through June 27, 2010, and organized by Dia curator at large Lynne Cooke, chronotopes & dioramas is Gonzalez-Foerster’s first major solo exhibition in the United States. There will be an opening reception on Tuesday, September 22, 2009 from 6-8pm.
For this project, Gonzalez-Foerster has chosen to treat a 3,700 square foot gallery located within the former Museum of the American Indian as an “annex” to the Society’s main library. (Recently renovated by Dia, this gallery is located in a traditional Beaux-Arts style building reopened to the public in 2008, after a 14-year closure.) Here, the artist will augment the library’s holdings of contemporary Iberian and Latin American literature with a selection of texts, both well-known and personally significant.
In the center of the gallery space, Gonzalez-Foerster will construct an approximately 50 foot wide, floor to ceiling structure containing three large-scale dioramas. Inspired by traditional natural history museum displays, the dioramas will depict three terrains – the tropics, the desert, and the North Atlantic. Traces of man-made interventions will be evident in each landscape, whose scenes will be rendered by a team of specialists from the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Additionally, a variety of quotations and texts will be printed onto the exterior of the dioramas in a panoramic calligram and will be immediately visible upon entering the gallery.
Gonzalez-Foerster’s three topographies will each contain various forms of literature ranging across works by J.G. Ballard, Roberto Bolaño, Jorge Luis Borges, Samuel Delany, and Clarice Lispector. Books will be sited in the dioramas, like the flora and fauna specimens of natural history habitat displays, as if they were the ‘indigenous inhabitants’ of each terrain.
The “annex” will amplify the Society’s historical holdings with works that span the 20th century, offering narratives of fiction and diaspora that parallel the institution’s geographically based model of collecting.
Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster was born in 1965 in Strasbourg, France. Among her recent solo exhibitions are projects for The Turbine Hall, Tate Modern, London (2008); MUSAC Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y Léon (2008); Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris / ARC, Paris (2007); Kunsthalle Zürich, Zurich (2004); and Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (2002). Her work is currently on view in Making Worlds, The 53rd International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia, 2009. She also participated in Skulptur Projekte Münster (2007) and Documenta XI, Kassel (2002). She is the recipient of the 2002 Marcel Duchamp Award, Paris, the 1996–97 Mies van der Rohe Award, Krefeld, and the Villa Kujoyama, Kyoto artist residency in 1996-97. In November 2009, she will present in collaboration with composer Ari Benjamin-Meyers a new performance in New York City as part of PERFORMA 09. Gonzalez-Foerster lives and works in Paris and Rio de Janeiro.
Link: Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster at Dia at the Hispanic Society
