20 Mar 2009 to 9 May 2009
Hours : Tuesday to Saturday: 10am - 6pm
Opening, Thursday 19 March, 6 – 8 pm
Hauser & Wirth London
196a Piccadilly
15 Old Bond Street
W1J 9DY
London
United Kingdom
Europe
p: + 44 (0)20 7287 2300
m:
f: + 44 (0)20 7287 6600
w: www.hauserwirth.com
Andreas Hofer, Maiden of the seven seas, 2008 Oil on board, 55 x 60 x 2.6 cm / 21 5/8 x 23 5/8 x 1 in
20 March – 9 May 2009, Hauser & Wirth London, Piccadilly
Andreas Hofer’s art constructs a shadow universe that is populated by phantoms and superheroes and full of preternatural occurrences. Time is out of wrack, bendable: home to a history that never happened. Visitors to air tsu dni oui sélavy encounter a tableau that mixes the real with the fantastical. Second-hand chairs and a table, carpets, and an upside-down staircase act like cryptic clues, props in a stage set that announce the artificiality of the setting whilst furnishing evidence of its lived existence.
Yellow retro wallpaper marches across half of the gallery, the backdrop to an ensemble of homemade Malevich images, aged personal snapshots and new paintings and drawings by the artist, which punctuate and add a further layer to the fiction spun by the installation. Details of the montage include a large photograph of a window, its frame a dark cross against the light, and a photograph showing the ghost of a grandfather clock, silhouetted in negative against grimy walls. The image is a still from ‘Return to Glennascaul’ (Hilton Edwards, 1951), a ghost story in which Orson Welles, playing himself whilst taking a break from the filming of ‘Othello’, becomes embroiled in time travel. This game of negatives intensifies with the Malevich pictures whose famous geometric shapes have been sliced out through the wallpaper to reveal the gallery wall. Cutting through layers of artifice, these doctored Maleviches are white on white, as though what the Russian Supremacist declared to be inventions from the future can now no longer be seen.
Through its traces of lived environments this exhibition conjures the ghosts of several of Hofer’s past shows: ‘Sweet Troubled Souls’ (Silverbridge, Paris 2007) in which he let the scarred walls left by the location’s previous tenancies to instill disquiet in the thirteen women in his paintings; and particularly ‘Phantom Gallery’, (simultaneously at Zürich and Sunset Boulevard, LA 2008), wherein the manufactured marks and stains found within what looked to be former living spaces testified poignantly to the imaginary pasts of previous occupants. In air tsu dni oui sélavy Hofer constructs a similar time jinxing fraud: the details of its interior bring back to life ‘c/o Puschmann’, a 1996 exhibition for which he moved much of the contents of a thrift store to a Munich art space, inviting artists and friends to exhibit and sell their own works amidst the bric-a-brac. This also featured copies of the Malevich paintings, revisiting in turn ’0.10 – The Last Futurist Exhibition of Pictures’ of 1915.
Hofer is primarily interested, as the writer Roberto Ohrt has pointed out, in creating ‘a lacunae in historical logic’, an ambition quite as fabulous as the comic book protagonists that regularly make an appearance in his work and whose presence announces that a fiction is being spun. He plays with the pitfalls of grand aspiration: the contradiction between the omnipotent superhero and his two-dimensional confinement, and the avant-garde’s inevitable succumbing to tradition.
The exhibition continues upstairs with a dense hang of new paintings and drawings in The American Room.
Andreas Hofer was born in 1963 in Munich and lives and works in Berlin. Between 1991 and 1997 he attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich and the Chelsea College of Art & Design in London. His recent solo exhibitions include ‘Andreas Hofer. White Space Black’ (2009), Oldenburger Kunstverein, ‘Phantom Gallery’ (2008), Hauser & Wirth Zurich and Sunset Boulevard, LA, ‘The Long Tomorrow’ (2007), MARTa Museum in Herford, ‘Only Gods Could Survive’ (2007), Metro Pictures, New York, and ‘Sweet Troubled Souls’ (2007), presented by Hauser & Wirth Zürich, London and Silverbridge in Paris. Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus in Munich dedicated a comprehensive museum exhibition, entitled (World without End), to Hofer in 2005,
‘Andreas Hofer. Phantom Gallery’, a catalogue featuring essays by Ursula Panhans-Bühler, Paul J Harden and Roberto Ohrt, is published by Steidl Hauser & Wirth.
Two limited edition artist’s books published by Silverbridge are also available: ‘Andreas Hofer: HINTER DEN HÜGELN’ and ‘Andreas Hofer: SUMMONING’.
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Berlinde De Bruyckere, Luca Giordano WE ARE ALL FLESH
3 April – 2 May 2009, Hauser & Wirth London, Old Bond Street
‘We are all Flesh. Berlinde De Bruyckere Luca Giordano’ is a collaboration between Hauser & Wirth and P. & D. Colnaghi & Co. Ltd.
Berlinde De Bruyckere has made a major new sculpture inspired by the paintings of Baroque Neapolitan artist Luca Giordano. Her themes are those that have always confronted humanity: suffering, loneliness, death and remembrance. She revisits religious and mythological subjects, re-imagining motifs from art history, yet her works possess a powerful resonance, startling in their vulnerability and associative reach. Deploying emotive and uncannily realistic materials — wax, wood, iron, wool, hair and the hides of horses — her figurative sculptures are life-like yet unnaturally distorted.
Her new work is a wax sculpture of two male figures, their disturbingly conjoined bodies forming a symbiotic dialogue with two pieces by Giordano, Saint Bartholomew and Prometheus Bound (both made circa 1660). These paintings each depict a muscular shackled male figure in the throes of torture, their strained flesh lit up against surrounding darkness. Using heavy chiaroscuro to emphasise the figures’ anatomy, the works possess a naturalism and dynamism that over 300 years after their execution seems contemporary.
In contrast to Giordano’s gleaming bodies portrayed within well-known gruesome stories, De Bruyckere is emphatically not a narrative artist: her works present the body as perishable and fragmented, eerily incomplete. Flesh resembles meat in her new sculpture — wrinkled, scarred and slack yet bizarrely autonomous. The incredible verisimilitude that she works into her forms — the translucent depth of skin tones and intricate landscape of surface details that pock and individualise each being — attest to painstaking care and empathy. Intolerably mutated, De Bruyckere’s forms shock then absorb the viewer through their disquieting beauty. “On one hand,” she has said, “I shoot disconcerting questions at the spectator, to which I do not give any reassuring answers; on the other hand, the presence of human characteristics in my figures is familiar, and therefore comforting.”
Berlinde De Bruyckere (born Ghent 1964) won international acclaim at the 2003 Venice Biennale, when her sculptures were shown in the Italia Pavilion. Recent solo shows include Espace Claude Berri, Paris (2008), Galleria Continua, San Gimignano (2007), Museum Moderner Kunst Kärnten, Klagenfurt (2007) and Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Ghent (2007). Her numerous group shows include the 3rd Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art (2009), ‘Artempo – Where Time Becomes Art’, Palazzo Fortuny, Venice (2007) and the 4th Berlin Biennial for Contemporary Art (2007). This is the second exhibition of her work at Hauser & Wirth London. Berlinde De Bruyckere lives and works in Ghent.
Luca Giordano (Naples 1634-1705 Naples) was one of the most celebrated artists of the 17th century, producing religious and mythological paintings as well as many decorative fresco cycles in both churches and palaces. Giordano’s early works, produced in his native Naples, show the influence of the powerful and sometimes dark art of Caravaggio and Jusepe de Ribera. From the 1650s onwards, Giordano travelled extensively in Italy and absorbed the ideas of other schools of painting, most notably that of Pietro da Cortona and such 16th century Venetian masters as Titian and Veronese. He developed an individual style characterised by a new sense of dazzling light and colour, and of movement and dramatic action, which was to anticipate Rococo art of the 18th century. Giordano worked in Naples, Venice, Florence and Madrid, and enjoyed great success throughout Europe.
GALLERY HOURS: Monday to Saturday 10am – 6pm Closed over Easter from Friday 10 April – Monday 13 April
CONCURRENT EXHIBITION: Andreas Hofer, 196A Piccadilly, 20 March – 9 May Opening: Thursday 19 March, 6 – 8 pm Gallery hours: Tuesday – Saturday, 10am – 6pm
