24 Sept 2010 to 18 Dec 2010
Tuesday to Saturday: 10am - 6pm
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
24 September – 18 December 2010, Hauser & Wirth London, Piccadilly In addition to our normal opening hours, during Frieze we will be open Monday 11 October, Sunday 17 October and Monday 18 October, 10 am — 6 pm Opening: Thursday 23 September 6 – 8 pm
Hauser & Wirth is proud to announce the gallery’s first posthumous show of Jason Rhoades’ work and the artist’s first European solo exhibition since his death in 2006. The exhibition features ’1:12 Perfect World’, Rhoades’ scale model of his groundbreaking 1999 exhibition, ‘Perfect World’ at Deichtorhallen in Hamburg. Originally existing as four quarters, the sterling silver model will be brought together at Hauser & Wirth’s Piccadilly gallery, viewable in its entirety for the first time. Like his previous exhibition, ‘The Black Pussy… and the Pagan Idol Workshop’ installed at Hauser & Wirth London in 2005, Rhoades’ incredibly complex installation ‘Perfect World’ created a visual maelstrom of miscellaneous objects and cultural allusions. ‘Things have meanings and meanings have multiplicity and the multiplicities have relationships to other meanings. It creates a kind of system which feeds on itself. It’s the idea of a perpetual motion machine as a work of art’. — Jason Rhoades ‘Perfect World’ (1999) was a ‘mega’ sculpture, a two-level installation created to fill the entirety of the Deichtorhallen, a gallery space of roughly 15,000 square feet with 80-foot high ceilings. Rhoades constructed the work from polished aluminium tubes and wooden triangles, creating a ‘lego system’ that allowed for continued expansion and echoed Marcel Duchamp’s seminal installation ‘Sixteen Miles of String’ (1942). ’1:12 Perfect World’ is a distilled version of this expansive original work, created by the artist as a way to capture and view the entire installation. Held aloft by the scaffolding-like structure was Rhoades’ 1:1 photographic reproduction of his father’s vegetable garden. This second level or ‘Eden’ was originally conceived as an ideal space, a ‘perfect world’ for Rhoades to continue his work during the exhibition. It was placed on a platform high up in the gallery and could only be accessed by two viewers at a time using a hydraulic lift. From this viewpoint, the gallery visitors below became part of the work whilst the viewers themselves were immersed in the sculpture, denied the perspective to make sense of its mind-boggling dimensions. Highlighting these dual aspects of ‘Perfect World’, the exhibition at Hauser & Wirth includes Rhoades’ ‘View From Above’ (2000), a miniature version of the upper level garden depicting his father’s vegetable plot in its entirety, and ‘View From Below (Guernica)’ (2000), which depicts the floorplan of the second level as it was built, a jagged shape full of treacherous gaps. Accompanying these models are two documentations of the original exhibition: a ‘Xerox book’ – consisting of approximately 400 drawings and created by the artist during the conception and production of the piece, intended as a sort of user’s manual; and segments of film and video shot during the erection of the work. In conjunction with the models, the film and drawings provide a balance between the physical and the ephemeral, the mind’s eye and the physical eye. For Rhoades, both the process and the pursuit of the installation were crucial to the overall effect of the piece. Throughout the duration of the Deichtorhallen exhibition, Rhoades wanted certain actions to continue, such as the cleaning of the aluminium pipes by a large Hammond polisher and the printing of photographs. The sounds of these processes, as well as music played by a Hammond organ nearby, were recorded and used to create ‘Sound Piece (Duet for Hammond and Hammond)’ (2000), shown in the American Room. As they approach this work, the visitor triggers motion detectors, starting the music. As more people gather around the work, more speakers are activated, recreating the cacophony of the Deichtorhallen exhibition.
Louise Bourgeois: The Fabric Works
15 October – 18 December 2010, Hauser & Wirth London, Savile Row
In addition to our normal opening hours, during Frieze the Savile Row gallery will be open Sunday 17 October and Monday 18 October, 10 am – 6 pm
Opening: Thursday 14 October 6 – 8 pm Curated by Germano Celant
Hauser & Wirth is proud to announce the inauguration of its new space at 23 Savile Row with a solo exhibition by the late Louise Bourgeois. The exhibition will feature over seventy fabric drawings made between 2002 and 2008, as well as four large-scale sculptures. Made from clothes and other domestic effects accrued over decades, Bourgeois’s fabric drawings are abstract yet acutely personal works, retaining allusions to the materials’ past incarnations. Curated by Germano Celant, the exhibition will travel from the Fondazione Vedova, Venice (5 June – 12 September 2010) to Hauser & Wirth London. The exhibition will be accompanied by a substantial catalogue published by Skira, which focuses on this major aspect of Bourgeois’s practice.
Fabric played an important role in Bourgeois’s life. She grew up surrounded by the textiles of her parents’ tapestry restoration workshop, and from the age of twelve helped the business by drawing in the sections of the missing parts that were to be repaired. A life-long hoarder of clothes and household items such as tablecloths, napkins and bed linen, from the mid-nineties Bourgeois cut up and re-stitched these, transforming her lived materials into art. Through sewing she attempted to effect psychological repair: ‘I always had the fear of being separated and abandoned. The sewing is my attempt to keep things together and make things whole’.
The fabric drawings are abstract and heterogeneous, deriving their formal logic from the juxtapositions of patterns printed on their materials and the artist’s long-standing motifs. Over a six-year period their designs evolved, exploring more intricate geometries and increasingly incorporating collaged elements. Stripy and chequered drawings that Bourgeois began making in 2002 weave thin strips of her garments together, bending the modernist grid. Later works adopt polygonal structures, stitching the fabrics so that the patterns form concentric circles and spirals similar to spider webs and the vibrant mirrorings of a kaleidoscope. Rather than being minimalist, these morphing geometries are supple and embracive, softly corporeal.
In juxtaposition to the drawings are three-dimensional pieces articulating an inescapable menace. The Cell, ‘Bullet Hole’ (1992), a black half-open, half-closed structure housing mysterious wooden orbs, bears the message ‘Fear makes the world go round’. ‘Peaux de Lapins, Chiffons Ferrailles À Vendre’ (2006), refers through its title to the traditional song of the street peddlers Bourgeois remembered from her childhood, yet its elements are unsettling: flesh-coloured forms hanging within a wire mesh resemble body parts – perhaps breasts or uteri or male genitalia – without being clear precisely which. Such suggestive ambiguity is typical of Bourgeois’s sculptures, enabling one thing to slip into and signify another, disturbing the viewers’ conceptions. This is particularly true of ‘Crouching Spider’ (2003), a key figure in this exhibition. Ferocious looking, the spider is also a creature who protects and repairs. In the earlier work ‘Maman’ (1999) Bourgeois explicitly used the spider as a metaphor for her mother who was an expert at spinning and weaving. Yet here amongst the wealth of woven, frequently web-like fabric drawings it’s clear that its symbolic reach goes further, standing for the artist herself.
For over seventy years, Louise Bourgeois (1911 – 2010) submitted her psychic life to intense examination, transforming her thoughts and emotions into a body of work of startling formal complexity. An extraordinarily radical and influential artist, her reputation as the most important female artist of our times was consolidated by an extensive retrospective of her work shown at Tate Modern (2007 – 2008) that toured to the Centre Pompidou, Paris, the Guggenheim Museum, New York, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden, Washington DC until May 2009. A major solo exhibition, ‘Louise Bourgeois: The Return of the Repressed’, will take place in South America in 2011, opening at Fundación Proa, Buenos Aires, in March and travelling to Instituto Tomie Ohtake, São Paolo, and Museu de Arte Moderna, Rio de Janeiro.
This exhibition will also mark the opening of Hauser & Wirth’s new space at 23 Savile Row. The space, which occupies over 15,000 square feet, provides an outstanding setting for larger exhibitions and more expansive installations. 23 Savile Row will be in addition to Hauser & Wirth’s existing operations at 196A Piccadilly and 15 Old Bond Street, as well as Hauser & Wirth’s Outdoor Sculpture programme in Southwood Garden, St James’s Church. The new space has been developed by architect Annabelle Selldorf, whose previous projects include Hauser & Wirth’s existing galleries in London, Zurich and New York, the Neue Galerie, New York, and the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown
