Private View & Performance | Wednesday 20 May 6 - 8pm White Crane performance by fashion project Moonspoon Saloon featuring Los Angeles band We Are The World
"armes de chine refers to a classic manual about weapons from ancient China. These objects, which once had a very specific and practical purpose, now several hundred years later seem completely abstract. Like a long lost slang" Tal R
Opening 20 May, Victoria Miro Gallery will present the latest body of work by Danish artist Tal R. From 2005 to 2008, in his dynamic studio 'Palace', Tal R extended his practice to incorporate collaborations in dance, film, theatre, cabaret, music and fashion, and it is in this period of intense experimentation that the works presented in armes de chine have their roots.
Described varyingly (and not exhaustively) as "owls, sad penises, eggs, elegant guard women with buns, lost scouts, wrong fruits, melted minimal ice cream, sad fruits, junk and bottles, tombstones, embarrassed old uncles", the objects - whether sculptures, paintings, or works on paper - are installed as a field across the floor of the main gallery space, with no work presented on the walls. The effect is almost that of a group show, where pockets of activity allow for explorations of ideas and discursive possibilities, with no fixed hierarchies of medium or modes of looking. Always pushing a concept to its most deliriously unexpected realms, Tal R continues his associative investigations of colour, form, and meaning in armes de chine by transforming each work into a kind of "long lost slang" of its own, honing his characteristically playful marriage of abstraction and representation into a new vocabulary for artistic production.
White Crane by Moonspoon Saloon, featuring We Are The World Performance Wednesday 20 May at 7.30pm
Moonspoon Saloon is a fashion project by Tal R, Sara Sachs and Noam Griegst. White Crane is a performance show created for Victoria Miro by Moonspoon Saloon featuring the Los Angeles band We Are The World. Again, the lost army marches in hysteria.www.moonspoonsaloon.com
Notes to Editors Tal R Israel-born, Denmark-based artist Tal R belongs to the group of artists who graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in the 1990s. Common to this generation of painters is a focus on expressive and painterly qualities, which they combine with personal and sometimes banal stories. Tal R describes his painting style as 'Kolbojnik', the Hebrew word for leftovers. Shunning hierarchies and intellectualism the artist uses the idea of a visual dustbin as an inexhaustible source of inspiration. Everything can be and is shown, no subject is too dull, too revealing or too commonplace. This down-to-earth attitude characterises his work, which is chaotic, humorous and full of movement.
Tal R was born in 1967 in Tel Aviv, Israel, and lives in Copenhagen. In 1986-88, he studied at Billedeskolen in Copenhagen, and in 1994-2000 he was at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Art in Copenhagen. Recent solo exhibitions include You laugh an ugly laugh, Kunsthalle zu Kiel, on view through 7 June 2009, The Sum, which toured in 2007 and 2008 at Louisiana Museum for Moderne Kunst, Denmark, Bonnefanten Museum, Maastricht, and the Camden Arts Centre, London.
Yayoi Kusama: Outdoor Sculptures 24 June - 25 July 2009
Three new giant dotted pumpkins by Yayoi Kusama are to be installed in Victoria Miro's canalside garden to mark the 80th birthday of Japan's most revered contemporary artist
Yayoi Kusama - whose legendary career spans six decades - celebrates her 80th birthday this year. To mark the occasion Victoria Miro is delighted to present, for the first time in London, three new pumpkin works. Situated in the gallery's canalside water garden the sculptures will be presented alongside her permanently installed iconic piece Narcissus Garden (1966 - ).
Kusama's acclaimed presentation in the Japanese pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 1993 - which consisted of a mirrored room filled with tiny pumpkin sculptures in which she sat in colour coordinated magician's attire - marked the beginning of the artist's preoccupation with the pumpkin motif. Following the Biennale she went on to produce a huge, yellow pumpkin sculpture covered with an optical pattern of black dots. This pumpkin came to represent for her a kind of alter ego or self-portrait and remains one of her signature series of works.
Kusama has completed several major outdoor commissions, some giant pumpkins and other sculptures in the form of brightly coloured grotesque plants and flowers, for public and private institutions including the Kirishima Open Air Musuem, Japan; Fukuoka Municipal Museum of Art and Matsumoto City Museum of Art in Japan; Eurolille in Lille, France; and recently, the Beverly Hills City Council in Los Angeles. Alongside these monumental works, she has produced smaller scale outdoor pieces including Key-Chan and Ryu-Chan a pair of dotted dogs, which will be installed in the Gallery's garden. All the outdoor works are cast in highly durable fiberglass-reinforced plastic, then painted in urethane to glossy perfection.
This presentation coincides with Walking in My Mind at the Hayward Gallery (23 June - 6 September). The Southbank Centre will be transformed into a vision of her signature polka dots with visitors able to immerse themselves in Dots Obsession (2009), a large mirrored corridor filled with red spotty balloons, and walk through a dot-covered landscape on one of the gallery's outside sculpture terraces. Twenty-five trees along Queen's Walk will also be covered in Kusama's red and white polka dots as part of the exhibition.
Biographical details Yayoi Kusama was born in Matsumoto City, Japan in 1929. Her work is in the collections of leading museums throughout the world including Tate Modern, London; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; LACMA, Los Angeles; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Centre Pompidou, Paris; and the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo. Major exhibitions of her work include Kitakyushu Municipal Museum of Art, Fukuoka, Japan (1987); Center for International Contemporary Arts, New York (1989); Love Forever: Yayoi Kusama,1958-1969, LACMA, 1998 (traveling to Museum of Modern Art, New York, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis and Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo), 1998-99; Serpentine Gallery, 2000; Le Consortium, Dijon, 2000 (traveling to selected venues in Europe and Korea), 2001-2003; KUSAMATRIX, Mori Museum of Art, Tokyo, 2004 (traveling to Art Park Museum of Contemporary Art, Sapporo Art Park, Hokkaido); Eternity - Modernity, National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo (touring Japan), 2004-2005; and The Mirrored Years, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, 2008, which toured to Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney and then to the City Gallery, Wellington, New Zealand later in 2009.
