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Richard Jackson
The
Little Girl's Room, 2011
fiberglass, steel, stainless steel, mdf, acrylic on
canvas, wood, rubber, motor, acrylic paint
190 x
288 x 312 inches (482.6 x 731.5 x 792.5 cm)
Courtesy
of David Kordansky Gallery Los Angeles, CA and Hauser &
Wirth, Zurich, Switzerland
Photography: Fredrik Nilsen
RICHARD
JACKSON
The
Little Girl's Room
September 10 – October 20, 2011
David Kordansky Gallery is very
pleased to announce The Little Girl's Room, an
exhibition of new work by Richard Jackson. His first solo
gallery exhibition in Los Angeles in 20 years, the show is a
significant milestone for an artist whose work has continually
expanded and redefined the physical and conceptual reach of
painting since the 1970s.
A
painting in the largest possible sense of the word, and the
latest in Jackson's series of major room-based works, The
Little Girl's Room consists of an immersive environment
designed to resemble the room of a child. Viewers will
encounter a paint-covered installation that exceeds the
constraints of purely visual experience; it is also the record
of a performative action that unites careful engineering with
unmediated experimentation and risk.
The
work's centerpiece is a monumentally-scaled sculpture of a
unicorn balanced on its horn, embraced by a life-size
sculpture of a strangely doll-like little girl, that spins
atop a motorized platform. Like many of the objects that
Jackson has developed over the course of his career, the piece
will be activated at the time of its installation in the
gallery space. As it spins, paint will be pumped through the
horse's genitals and spray and drip across the other elements
of the installation. These include the large-scale canvases
that depict fluffy clouds and geometric forms borrowed from
Frank Stella, as well as an array of other objects that feel
at once familiar and disturbingly out of place in the context
of a child's room.
The
sculptural figures that serve as both sources and supports for
paint represent extremes of physicality in which the infantile
and the archaic resemble each other. A larger-than-life
Jack-in-the-box will be draped over one of the gallery's
trusses, and when activated will emit paint downward from the
pointy tip of its hat; a hobby horse, its head lodged in a
bucket of paint, will rock back and forth, dumping the
bucket's contents onto the floor around it; a sculpture of a
baby will sit with a collection of baby bottles, filled and
overfilled with paint; and, half-hidden in a closet, a
comically aroused clown will communicate an aura of
unsuccessfully repressed sexuality.
Though Jackson's work seems to take aim at the
heroic tropes that defined painting by the middle of the last
century, it is neither pure critique nor pure homage. Rather,
it maximalizes the potential of the individual artist in an
age when the physical dimension of art making is often
supplanted by an array of proxies. Throughout The Little
Girl's Room, paint acts as a vital fluid, one that unites
the work's concept with its tangible reality, and that
maximizes its pictorial capability by giving rise to
three-dimensional objects through which it is pumped and
poured.
As
such, Jackson crosses many of the dominant––and sometimes
diverging––modes of modernist and contemporary artistic
practice like live wires. By bringing the seemingly competing
legacies of Duchamp and the Abstract Expressionists into
productive (if uneasy) relation, Jackson imagines and creates
ever larger and more embodied situations for painting. In his
work, the power of individual human activity is not merely
depicted or described in metaphorical terms, but enacted in
the flesh.
In
recent years Richard Jackson has been the subject of solo
exhibitions at the Rennie Collection, Vancouver; Kunststiftung
Erich Hauser, Rottweil, Germany; Hauser & Wirth, Zürich;
and Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin. Recent
group exhibitions include The Artist's Museum, Museum
of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Promenades, Magasin
– Centre national d'art contemporain de Grenoble;
Bodycheck, 10. Triennale Kleinplastik, Fellbach,
Germany; and Los Angeles – Paris, Centre Georges Pompidou,
Paris, France. Later this year his work will on view in
American Exuberance, Rubell Family Collection, Miami. In 2013
Jackson will be the subject of a major retrospective organized
by the Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, California
and traveling to other institutions in the United States and
abroad.
This
exhibition is part of Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A.
1945–1980, a Getty initiative that brings together more
than sixty cultural institutions from across Southern
California to examine the history of contemporary art in Los
Angeles.
DAVID KORDANSKY
GALLERY
3143 S.
La Cienega Blvd, Unit A
Los
Angeles, CA 90016
T: 1
323-222-1482
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