March 13 to April 17th 2009

We are delighted to announce a solo exhibition with drawings by Nelleke Beltjens (born in 1974), shown for the first time at our gallery. It also marks the first solo presentation in Germany for this Dutch artist. Her sculptures and drawings have been attracting international attention for years now, especially in the United States where she has been living since 1998, with a few short interruptions. Nelleke Beltjens currently teaches sculpture at Montana State University in Bozeman, USA.

The exhibition, called FRAGMENTS OF THE PARTS, indicates a fundamental characteristic of the time-consuming and work-intensive ink drawings: There are no closed outlines; all of the "lines" have been divided into their minutest of components. With Nelleke Beltjens' drawings since 2006, linear structures only consist of a myriad of short pencil marks placed crossways to the direction they run in. These are rather more like rhythmically placed punctuations than they are linear units. The interplay between visibility and invisibility is a leitmotif for these works, whose dialectic is expressed in titles such as "Incomplete Completion", "(Im)possibilities", or "Fragments of the Parts". Invisibility here not only refers to the empty spaces between the marks or the free surfaces of the paper, but also to the fact that only about 50 percent of the marks placed here may be seen. Beltjens always works with paper rectangles as "guides", upon which about half of each ink-pencil mark remains. For several of her works she has integrated these paper tools with their densely covered edges into the drawn pages again, thus illustrating her working procedure.

Concerning the perception of Beltjens' drawings, there is the confusing fact that they may never be completely comprehended by the eye, let alone be categorized by it (accordingly, they are scarcely done justice in photographs). From a distance they reveal a feather-light, cloudy charm, but upon closer look they disintegrate into an overabundance of individual information, which overtaxes the eye in its attempt to structure and determine it. Making us conscious of our viewing as a complex orientation process in an overly-complex reality is one of the artist's intentions.

The words in the title "FRAGMENTS" and "PARTS" cause us to assume an imaginary whole. We could point to the composer Pierre Boulez, who once posed the rhetorical question whether the real work were not to some extent a more or less random fragment of a large, imaginary, virtual work, whose beginning and end we do not desire to know. The same may be said of the drawings by Nelleke Beltjens, which she always creates while listening to music and which themselves contain bear something of that intangible and indeterminable quality inherent to musical phenomena.

Peter Lodermeyer

 

 

Galerie Christian Lethert
Antwerpener Straße 4
D-50672 Cologne
+49 (0)221 35 60 590

 

 

 

 

Mireille Mosler, Ltd.
35 East 67th Street
New York, NY 10065
+1 212.249.4195

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

March 13 - April 25, 2009

Zach Feuer Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new paintings by Dana Schutz.

For her latest exhibition, Missing Pictures, Schutz depicts halted hobbyists, demonstrative group efforts, therapeutic situations, and fragments of people passing time. These tableaux take place in late-afternoon interiors, constructed stage-like settings and isolated pastoral landscapes that appear to be at the edge of an industrialized world. The paintings depict activities that precede an event, making visible the pictorial moment, frozen and deferred, before an image comes into being and form becomes manifest.

Here, Schutz treats the picture as a material, a malleable situation where the rearrangement of objects is implied. Bodies are props and seem to have come from a previous context. Some paintings on view depict suspended narratives in which the objects and characters appear to have been singed, as if something terrible happened from outside the frame. In one painting 'before' and 'after' collide as a small religious group tries to reassemble a car and driver after an accident. Singers never finish their songs, contracts remain unsigned and writers hover on the cusp of the next letter. Passing time is implied as trains cut through frozen scenes and clouds scroll by an introspective sculpture that has managed to sit on, merge with and block out an otherwise festive couple.

In Schutz's new work, preliminary information, such as schematic stains and thumbnail sketches, remain visible and are incorporated into the finished paintings. Linear marks deface the picture. Features peel off their subjects. Spaces dissolve as washes misalign with patterned fields. As Schutz shows us around the sunny and anxious territory of her most recent fiction, the paintings unmake themselves in front of us.

Dana Schutz was born in 1976 in Livonia, Michigan. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. This is her fourth solo exhibition at Zach Feuer Gallery.

 

 

ZACH FEUER GALLERY (LFL)
530 West 24th Street
New York, NY 10011
+1 212 989 7700

 

 

 

 

 

 

Matthew Barney
Ancient Evenings: Libretto

March 20 - May 9, 2009

Gladstone Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new drawings by Matthew Barney from Ancient Evenings, a seven act opera loosely based on Norman Mailer's 1983 Egyptian-set novel and currently in development by Barney and composer Jonathan Bepler.

Each act of the opera chronicles one of the seven stages that the soul passes through after the death of the body. Remaining true to the original theme of rebirth and reincarnation, Ancient Evenings recasts the central myth of Isis and Osiris in a contemporary industrial landscape. Barney has replaced the human body with the body of the 1967 Chrysler Imperial that was the central motif from his earlier film Cremaster 3. This exhibition will include drawings that explore the character and thematic development of the first two acts, entitled "Ren" and "Sekhem." Obsessively drawn, Barney's graphite drawings map the conceptual depths of each project rather than presenting storyboard-like narratives. Barney evokes his beautifully rendered imagery with the addition of non-traditional materials such as petroleum jelly and metal leaf, in addition to lapis dust and PCL, a plastic derived from crude oil. Alongside these drawings, Barney has taken seven copies of Mailer's novel to create unique sculptures inside wall-mounted vitrines. Each piece contains one copy resting upon a bed of carved salt and opened to a spread that bears a drawing pertaining to one of the seven stages of the soul. In co-mingling Barney's draftsmanship with passages that comprise the opera's libretto, each book represents a different aspect of Barney's new interpretation of Mailer's novel.

Matthew Barney was born in 1967 and studied art at Yale University. He has received numerous awards including the Aperto prize at the 1993 Venice Biennale; the 1996 Hugo Boss Award; and the 2007 Kaiser Ring Award. He has been included in group exhibitions worldwide such as Documenta IX in Kassel, Germany; the Whitney Biennials of 1993 and 1995; and the groundbreaking "Post-Human" exhibition in 1992. His solo exhibition "The Cremaster Cycle," organized by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, traveled to the Museum Ludwig, Cologne, and the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. The large-scale exhibition of the entire "Drawing Restraint" series was organized by the 21st Century Museum for Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, and traveled to Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Serpentine Gallery, London; and Kunsthalle Vienna. A retrospective of the Cremaster and Drawing Restraint videos was presented by the Fondazione Merz, Torino, in 2008.

Act 1 of Ancient Evenings, "Ren," was performed in Los Angeles in May 2008.
Acts 2 - 4 are currently in production for summer 2009.

Gladstone Gallery
12 rue du Grand Cerf
Grote Hertstraat
1000 Brussels
Belgium
+32 2 513 35 31

 

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