RICHARD DEACON | Add & Subtract June 27 to August 15, 2009
Eröffnung : Freitag, 26. Juni, 19-21 Uhr Opening on Friday, June 26, 7–9pm, parallel Idris Khan in the gallery’s Window Space
On Friday, June 26, 2009, from 7 to 9 pm, Galerie Thomas Schulte opens Add & Subtract, an exhibition showing new sculptures and wall drawings by British sculptor Richard Deacon, who celebrates his sixtieth birthday this summer. The artist will be present at the opening.
In Add & Subtract, his third solo show at Galerie Thomas Schulte, Richard Deacon presents two new wood sculptures, a steel sculpture, and large wall drawings. All three uses of different media continue Deacon’s subjects of exploring space, volume, material experience, dynamism, as well as combinatorics, and attest to his uncompromising search for the limits and possibilities of contemporary sculpture, without taking recourse to an expansion of the concept. In both his wall drawings and his sculpture, Deacon is always interested in the correlation between inside and outside, front and rear, height and depth.
In his wood sculptures, Deacon seems above all to explore new ways of condensing the corpus, more strongly closing the structures. In earlier wood sculptures, as in the spatially expansive work How Much Does Your Mind Weigh with its open serial structure, which Deacon presented in the Corner Space of Thomas Schulte in 2007, the beholder often had the sensation of being inside the sculpture.
In the new work Still Water, the sculpture remains much more autonomous, and preserves a distance to the beholder, always remaining an object for the perceiving subject. All the same, the observers clearly sense themselves in the force field between the sculpture and the surrounding space, and walking around the object search for views inside or through the object and the inner spaces enclosed by the sculpture as immaterial shapes, and for an immanent principle of order.
Deacon’s sculptures capture in form the struggle between chaos and order, between formlessness and rigorous structure, and are the result of his work with material immanent processes of tension in his preferred materials, steel, copper, glass, plastics, ceramics, and wood. In the work Still Water, for example, the horizontal pieces of wood, twisted and bent against one another, only seem held together with the greatest force by the two different and differently sizes lattice-like side elements. While one side wall is designed as an open, regular lattice of similar form elements, the other consists of a dense structure made up of formal elements that are only apparently identical. The “direction” in which the sculpture should be read remains unclear, and it remains an open question whether here order results from chaos or chaos from order.
Richard Deacon was born in 1949 in Bangor, Wales. Since his 1978 exhibition at London’s Tate Gallery he has held numerous individual shows, participated in internationally significant group exhibitions and been commissioned with outstanding projects. His important solo shows in recent years include: 2008 Portland Art Museum (Portland), 2006 Arp Museum Bahnhof Rolandseck (Remagen), 2004/03 Henry Moore Institute (Leeds), 2003, Museum Ludwig (Cologne), 2001 PS1 (New York). Deacon is currently preparing a comprehensive retrospective that will open 2010 at Musée de Strasbourg and travel in 2011/12 to Korea and to Hanover’s Sprengel Museum. Deacon’s art has been awarded many prizes, including the Turner Prize in 1987. After 12 years of having taught at École Nationale Supérieur des Beaux Arts in Paris, Deacon is set to take on professorship at Akademie der Künste in Düsseldorf. Richard Deacon lives and works in London.
IDRIS KHAN | Lines
June 27–August 15, 2009 Opening on Friday, June 26, 7–9pm, parallel with Richard Deacon
On Friday, June 26, 2009, from 7 to 9 pm Galerie Thomas Schulte will open two parallel exhibitions showing new sculptures and wall drawings by British sculptor Richard Deacon in the main gallery space and new photographic works by Idris Khan in the gallery’s Window Space.
Parallel to Richard Deacon, Idris Khan will be showing three new photographic works in the gallery’s Window Space. In these pieces, the artist engages with the works of Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi, one of the most important medieval Islamic mystics and Persian poets. Influenced by the work of Agnes Martin, Idris Khan sees a strong link between the grid and lattice images characteristic of Martin’s work and the appearance of a manuscript page of Arabic calligraphy. Martin’s influential texts show a clear interest in Eastern philosophies, which lead the artist in her painting towards grids and patterns that exude a great meditative sensuality.
Khan’s latest photographic works on view at the exhibition Lines suggest that the artist now wants to reverse the process of discovering a formal language as a painterly means of expression for philosophical ideas: using his typical layering technique, the philosophical ideas in Rumi’s manuscript materialize into a highly aesthetic abstract pattern of grids and lattices.
Idris Khan (born in 1978 in Birmingham) lives and works in London. Since graduating from the Royal College of Art, he has been experimenting with appropriation art in photography and film. Idris Khan had his first museum show in 2008 at K20 in Düsseldorf.
Galerie Thomas Schulte Charlottenstraße 24 D-10117 Berlin phone +49 (0)30 2060 8990 fax +49 (0)30 2060 89910
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