The Apartment is delighted to announce the first solo exhibition in Athens of British artist Sadie Murdoch. The opening will be held on Wednesday, October 5 from 8 to 10 pm, in the presence of the artist.
Immersed in questions of feminism, identity politics and social inclusion, Sadie Murdoch’ s work considers less-known and often contradictory facets of modernism. Fascinated by women who have been sidelined from the dominant version of modernism, Murdoch re-stages seminal women characters from Eileen Gray to Josephine Baker and re-creates open-ended narratives that cast a shadow on orthodox readings of modernism.
In “Mirrored Self-Portrait I and II”, two works from her Modelling Charlotte Perriand project originally exhibited at the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, Murdoch re-considers the role of Charlotte Perriand in the history of modernist architecture and design. Murdoch re-creates an archive image of Perriand seating on a Chaise Longue, an emblematic object that she co-designed with Le Corbusier, only this time Murdoch herself stands in for Perriand, thus reclaiming the latter’s role in the project of modernism.
Similarly in “African Chair (for Gunta Stölzl)", Murdoch pays hommage to Gunta Stölzl, an influential and prolific designer who, like Perriand, was over-shadowed by her male counterparts. Stölzl worked with Marcel Breuer on the African Chair, in which the textile element was directly woven into the wood (an original idea for the time), which does not bear her name. Through re-staging Stölzl, Perriand and other seminal figures, Murdoch becomes both the author and subject in her work and aptly poses questions on authorship while expanding her critique to the social hierarchy of modernism.
“Baker Fix” takes its inspiration from “The Electric Fairy", a costume worn by Josephine Baker, an African American entertainer who took Paris by storm in the 1920s. She was a muse and lover of several modernist artists and architects. Baker's acts of self parody, her intense physicality and her ambivalent relationship to her own identity have ensured that her presence reverberates in a provocative fashion throughout orthodox histories of modernism, underscoring the movement's fascination with, and formal reliance upon, the 'exotic'. This fascination with ‘otherness’ and the desire to escape the rationalism of modern society has been central to the Surrealist Manifesto, another vision of modernism. Celebrating techniques such as automatic writing and the recording of dreams in a quest for the unconscious, the surrealists have proposed yet another modernist narrative which Murdoch has tried to resurface in her series of ink drawings. The fragility and materiality of these works reflects the Surrealists’ poetic ideal, but also underlines the necessity to integrate alternative strands of modernism.
Sadie Murdoch (b.1965, UK) was an Abbey Rome Scholar at the British School in Rome in 2002 and completed the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York in 2004. Solo exhibitions include the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds (2007), and The Agency, London (2008 and 2009). In 2008, she was included in the International Women’s Biennial in South Korea. Recent group shows include “Ballet Mecanique”, curated by Emma Dexter at Timothy Taylor, London and ‘Yesterday’s Tomorrows’ at the Musee d’ Art Contemporain, Montreal. Concurrent with her exhibition at The Apartment, Sadie Murdoch has a solo exhibition at The Agency in London titled ‘Dream of Dreamers’.
Frank Selby True Believers October 13 - November 12, 2011
The Apartment is delighted to announce an exhibition of new works by American artist Frank Selby. The opening will be held on Thursday, October 13 from 8 to 10 pm.
In his first solo exhibition in Athens, Selby presents a series of intricate drawings that focus on the imagery and language of social change (all works 2011). Using found media imagery he renders painstaking drawings of protests, riots and social upheavals. The working process is meticulous, obsessive and labor intensive.
Writing in the New York Times, Karen Rosenberg argues for drawing as an expanded translation «not a mechanical translation, as in say, Warhol’s silk-screened photographs of riots, but a recognizable human kind, as in Frank Selby’s hand-drawn copies od similar images». Selby’s ambition goes way beyond the precise rendition of drawing after photography and the investigation of the formal affinities between the two mediums. Through the re-examination of the archive, Selby questions the conventions and limitations of documentary photography and recognizes mis-representation as an inescapable factor in the reading of an image. Selby himself rejects the authoritative nature of representation and resolves to the trasformative photohraphic techniques of doubling and mirroring, which he applies to his drawings, often to dramatic effect. This eerie sense of fragmentation and disjointedness blurs the boundaries between presence and absence, reality and simulation, history and myth.
Following closely the recent Greek riots, Selby presents one work where he has merged images of the specific events alongside other protest imagery of another time and place. His desire is not to extract or refer to the specific events but to present them “as instances of groups of people for whom a failure of language has created a crisis. These crises are, in his own words, ‘their own form of communication and are as inadequate as any linguistic formulation. In a way, the crisis is a signifier or a representation of the underlying disagreement. In that sense the set of ideas is absent from the action, as any representation of a thing or idea implies its absence. Distancing us further from the ideas are the documentation, the discussion, the historicization and the mythologization of the crises. The possibility for any real understanding of the events is extremely faint”.
Frank Selby (b.1975, USA) has had solo exhibitions in New York, Miami and Paris. His work has been included in many group exhibitions, most recently in the exhibition ‘Drawn From Photography’ at the Drawing Centre in New York (2011). Selby’s work is widely collected and can be found in numerous collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
