May 27- July 10, 2010

5 June - 17 July 2010

 

We take great pleasure in announcing our next exhibition. In a second solo exhibition called Fear of Falling, we will be showing both recent and the very newest works by Max Sudhues, an artist who lives in Berlin. The title is a playful, and playfully ironic, reference to the neurotic fear we have of falling again after we have already fallen once.

 

Using Loops of "found" video tape recordings of everyday occurrences, which he then alienates minimally using digital means, Sudhues examines the formal characteristics of everyday situations and transforms random events (defective pipes spewing water at a construction site, a platform anchored in Hamburg Harbor) into small stories of human wear and tear, of attraction and repulsion.

 

In installations and projection works consisting of objects lit up to enhance their shadows, the artist comes up with allegorical, sometimes stirring worlds of pictures which, though man is absent from them, nevertheless indicate his actions and his standards in a field of tension spanning emotion, technology and nature.

 

In his works, Max Sudhues examines the simplest of things with respect to their surface, form and structure - and, what is more, checks them for new correlations of content by bringing them together with the techniques of lightprojection long thought to be outmoded (such as overhead and slide projections): Netting left over from oranges and lemons, but also rubber mats and halves of plastic eggs suddenly want to tell their own spatial stories in new combinations. In this way, and in contrast to the modest, minimal means of what seems to be nothing, neglected things, and things that have been discarded, projections of meaningful(l) pictures and symbols made of light, material and their shadows now grow, always staged in reference to the surrounding space.

 

"To the viewer, who surrenders himself to the interplay between and light and shadows in this space-dominating work, a spark of poetry comes across, although the means of this interplay - the overhead projector, digital projector, and everyday object - are strikingly present and just as visible as the projections themselves. As integral components of all of Sudhues's works, production and perception, construction and deconstruction, illusion and disillusion enter into an exciting interrelationship. (...)

 

With its multiple levels of meaning and visual surprises, Max Sudhues's collaged course of projections has been conceived as an APPROXIMATELY INFINITE UNIVERSE, as Yoko Ono once sang of it in 1973, as one of the artist's most recent works is called. "

(Sara Stehr)

 

Image:
Max Sudhues
Fear of Falling
Installation view, 2010
Galerie Christian Lethert

 

Galerie Christian Lethert
Antwerpener Straße 4
50672 Cologne
T +49 (0)221 35 60 590
E info @ christianlethert.com

 

Galerie Christian Lethert, Cologne 

 

Read On... Galerie Christian Lethert, Cologne 

 

June 10 - July 16, 2010

P·P·O·W is pleased to present Ben Gocker's first solo exhibition, There is really no single poem. Quoting from a letter from poet Jack Spicer to poet Robin Blaser, Gocker takes his title from Spicer's intriguing claim, "There is really no single poem." Though there are no poems per se to be found among Gocker's bright installations, drawing series, and wall-mounted sculptures, there is significant attention paid to the idea that no work of art should or can exist alone. As Spicer put it, "[Poems] cannot live alone any more than we can." This creative ethos is reflected in Gocker's inscription of the names of numerous friends, acquaintances, and loved ones in one of the show's centerpieces, the large painting titled simply Names-as it is in Gocker's display of book covers for imaginary books, a sort of fantastic prelude to unrealized genius, called, Floating Collection. Each of these works contains elements that cannot stand in solitude, that invite other elements to surround, contextualize, and interrogate them. Each of these works is brilliantly illuminated by others in the show; Gocker emphasizes interaction, dialog, allusion, and sociability even as he mourns the ephemeral service into which these forms are pressed.

 

Gocker, like Spicer, takes an interest in the series. Like Claes Oldenburg, Yves Klein, Richard Tuttle, and Martin Kippenberger, Gocker knows when to allow color and form to take center stage. This formal timing is on display in the large installation piece Early Poem, a mix of both found and made objects arranged on a page-like platform. There is also Scroll, an extended, obsessively detailed panoramic illustration Gocker has been at work on continuously, for over three years. These works construct differently punctuated narratives of time and invite the viewer (or 'reader') to play with ideas of sequence, at the same time creating a kind of half-imagined bridge between the vernaculars of American folk art and the tactics of minimalism.

 

Other works include Untitled, a triptych of large color wheels drawn on plaster in colored pencil. Another wall will be hung with a grid of thirty 'drawings' on plaster pages, notes the artist has saved over time and redone on the pages, reproductions of sketches from his notebooks. Lastly there will be a box, sometimes assembled sometimes not, with carved and carefully painted staffs reminiscent of Brancusi's Endless Column, titled Calendar, which Gocker will be changing throughout the course of the show.

 

The show is also concerned with space, especially as regards connecting the physical to the conceptual via the act of naming. Most pointedly, a series of twenty-two monochromes entitled Death & Friends evocatively bears witness to the nature of Gocker's relationships, bringing friends into the room simply by naming. These objects are totemic: stand-ins for people and memories in Gocker's life, they inspire recollection, even as they refuse to substitute fully for that which can only exist in memory, which is to say, a tale that may or may not be recalled in full. Here, as with all of his work, a practice of memorialization is left open to the viewer; the object recalls not just an independent event but its own making, interrogating the border between the completed work and the limitless possibility of expression with which the work began.

 

Ben Gocker was born in Rochester, NY in 1979. He received an MFA in poetry from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. He currently lives in Queens, NY and is a librarian at the Brooklyn Public Library.

 

Image:
Ben Gocker
Untitled (Part of Early Poem) 2009
plaster, paint, wood, tin, variable dimensions
8 1/2 x 5 x 4 1/2 inches
Courtesy of P.P.O.W, New York

 

P.P.O.W
511 West 25th Street, Room 301
New York, NY 10001
T +1 212-647-1044
E info @ ppowgallery.com

 

 

Mick Peter's work is derived from his interest in monumental sculpture and emblems of stupidity, producing objects with athromorphist personalities as scratchy paradoxes in lumpen matter. Using the traditional techniques of a sculptor Peter cuts, carves and hollows out material, but disrupts the integrity of this formalist process by coating the surfaces with cement or pigmented latex to create a more illusionary quasi-painted appearance. This appearance alludes to Peter's interest in drawing, and illustration, taking inspiration from the homogenous and anti-realistic colour processes of the 'comix' phenomenon of the 60s and 70s, but also ties in with the old fashioned ideals of early abstract modernist sculptors. His more recent sculpture draws from a broad catalogue of literary and theoretical references transposing the incongruity and strangeness of politically charged narratives.

 

For his solo exhibition at Cell Project Space Peter will present a new version of The Nose, an installation project made for 'La Salle de Bains', Lyon earlier this year. Using the 19th century writer Nikolai Gogol's story of the same name and Dmitri Shostakovich's opera adaptation as emblems for the project the work explores the jarring absurdity of the former and the performance history and sceneography of the latter. The original story recounts an incident in which a Russian official wakes one morning to find that his nose is missing from his face; he later encounters the nose riding around St Petersburg in a carriage, dressed as a government official. While The Nose was regarded as a humorous but trivial anecdote for almost a century, later 20th century critics considered it to be a social satire on Russian culture, a Marxist critique of socioeconomic class, or a psychosexual fantasy, and a meta-narrative about the process of storytelling. In this ambitious floor to ceiling installation Peter integrates his anthromorphist treatment of human form into the schematic environment of the gallery itself. By combining a new cement wall relief with rubber objects the environment alludes to the cartoon-like aftermath of a rehearsal where music stands are left drooping towards the floor and The Nose has left the building.

 

'The Nose: Epilogue' is Mick Peter's first solo show in London since 'Fortescue Avenue/ Jonathan Viner' in 2007. Recent projects include The Changing Room Stirling, 'Dr Syntax versus the Paperweights' (2010), Galerie Crèvecoeur, Paris, 'The Lumber Room' (2009), Zoo Galerie, Nantes & Generator Projects, Dundee, 'Harmonielehre' (2009), CAPC, Bordeaux, 'Insiders - pratiques, usages, savoir-faire' (2009) and Museé d'Art Contemporain Lyon, 'N'importe Quoi' (2009).

 

Forthcoming projects include 'Le Vent des forêts, France'. (July 2011), 'The British Art Show 7' (October 2010) and the 'Prix Ricard' (September 2010)

 

Image:
Mick Peter
The Nose: Epilogue
Courtesy of the artist and Cell Project Space, London

 

 

Cell Project Space
258 Cambridge Heath Road
E2 9DA London
T + 44 (0) 20 72413600
E info @ cellprojects.org

 

Cell Project Space 

 

Read On... Cell Project Space, London