5 July 2007

re-title.com newsletter - Sculpture & Installation July 2007

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Chambers Fine Art, New York Studio 1.1 London Sprüth Magers Projekte, Munich I-20 New York SUNDAY, New York Krobath Wimmer, Vienna Frith Street Gallery, London Next from re-title.com         sign up!

Chambers Fine Art, New York What About Sculpture? Ai Weiwei Zheng Guogu Liu Jianhua Zhang Huan Shi Jinsong Song Dong Yin Xiuzhen Wang Tiande 7 June - 19 July 2007 Four years after the exhibition Alors, la Chine? held at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris posed this question about general developments in the world of contemporary art in China, the current exhibition focuses on sculpture which has had considerably less exposure than oil painting, video and photography. In part this is because fewer artists in the 1990s found three-dimensional expression to be suitable for the exploration of the social issues that were of such importance during this period. Since Chinese art of this period was all about breaking down barriers, however, many artists who started life as calligraphers, performance artists or photographers have found themselves irresistibly drawn to sculpture and the making of objects. Included in the exhibition are works by Ai Weiwei, Zheng Guogu, Liu Jianhua, Zhang Huan, Shi Jinsong, Song Dong, Yin Xiuzhen, and Wang Tiande, none of whom with the exception of Shi Jinsong, would consider sculpture to be their primary medium. Without question, however, these versatile artists have produced some of the most provocative sculpture to have been produced in China in the last decade. The human figure is only represented in fragmentary form by Zhang Huan's Buddha Finger and United Hands by Song Dong and Yin Xiuzhen. Deeply moved by the destruction of cultural and religious assets in Tibet, Zhang Huan has created a series of monumental enlargements of sculptural fragments as memorials to this tragic loss. In their charmingly home-spun homage to their mutual attachment, Song Dong and Yin Xiuzhen use casts of their own hands, each holding a chopstick and supporting a miniature DVD screen documenting a bicycle ride around their neighborhood. The sculptures of Shi Jinsong, Zheng Guogu and Wang Tiande represent objects rather than the human form. Shi Jinsong transforms well known logos into fearsome-looking implements in his Secret Book of Cool Weapons while Zheng Guogu and Wang Tiande use the form of the bottle for entirely different purposes. Trained in Chinese painting, Wang Tiande uses the form of the bottle as a sculptural support for layers of ink-soaked xuan paper. This contrasts dramatically with the group of twelve metal bottles by Zheng Guogu who first came to prominence in through the spontaneous style of his documentation of the youth culture of the small provincial city of Yangjiang where he lives. The permanence of these mundane objects, predicted to oxidize over a period of 2000 years, contrast with the ephemeral quality of urban life today. Liu Jianhua and Ai Weiwei are both inspired by the long history of ceramics in Chinese history. Liu Jianhua was trained in Jingdezhen, the most important ceramic production in China with a history of over 2000 years. In Regular/Fragile he has moved away from the colorful, decorative appearance of his earlier work in favor of a monochromatic palette and imagery that recalls the excesses of European Baroque. Ai Weiwei rediscovered classical Chinese art when he returned to Beijing from New York in 1994. With his Duchampian sensibility, however, he questions while he admires, covering authentic Neolithic pots with brightly colored paint in Colored Vases and recreating a ruyi, a traditional Chinese auspicious symbol, as a colorful recreation of the human intestinal system. Image: Shi Jinsong Secret Book of Cool Weapons (Nike, Mercedes, Motorola, Citroen) 2002, steel and leather Dimensions variable Courtesy of Chambers Fine Art Chambers Fine Art, New York Read on... Chambers Fine Art, New York

Studio 1.1 London JOHN WALLBANK Hazard All 15 June - 15 July 2007 studio1.1 is pleased to present in his first solo show in England, a huge new sculptural work by young artist John Wallbank. The work will take up the major part of the gallery space reversing the old adage about sculpture being something you fall over when stepping back to look at a painting. This multi-structured piece has been steadily growing and re-forming over the past year in his studio, a structure built up organically with a sort of G-plan offcut brutalism, perhaps addressing an idea of 'modernism' that we seem to have failed. A subtly detailed almost phantasmagoric structure whose Quixotic cubism belies the seriousness of his enquiry into the contradictions within the creative act between intuition and analysis. The work is pieced together in a sincere hope for enlightenment. A romantic journey into literal and conceptual space with no predefined destination. Image: John Wallbank Hazard All Installation at Studio 1.1 Courtesy of the artist and Studio 1.1 Studio 1.1 London Read on...Studio 1.1 London

Sprüth Magers Projekte, Munich MARTIN WÖHRL AMORE 24 May - 28 July 2007 Monika Sprüth and Philomene Magers are pleased to present Martin Wöhrl's second solo exhibition at Sprüth Magers Projekte. He presents two new large- format sculptures - "AMORE" and "SAFARI" - as well as several smaller works. In 1961, Richard Artschwager first introduced the idea of sculpture-as-furniture, creating a virtually three- dimensional picture of a piece of furniture. He also initiated the use of furniture construction materials for artistic purposes. Subsequent generations have developed this concept in a variety of ways. Martin Wöhrl is a sculptor in the classic sense; his artistic approach varies considerably from piece to piece. A fleeting everyday observation is just as likely to form the background for one of his works as a complex idea which progresses through a series of preliminary designs, leading to the final sculpture. Some works are created by chance from the "waste products" of finished works. They are however further developed and modified, as the loosely-connected series of baroque "Gloriolen" (2006) shows: the materials for the layered pressboard coronas were originally the leftovers from working with a saw. In the Munich exhibition, tall letters cut from door leaves (some of which were taken from institutions, others from private households) form the word "AMORE", imposing themselves onto the room. The individual letters stand closely-packed in the first room of the gallery, leaning against the wall, winding around the corner; they almost seem to be positioned at random. The bold, broad typography, the dreary patina of the door leaves and the promise contained in the meaning of that single word - they all mutually reinforce one another, yet no single aspect of the work dominates over the others. Wöhrl is in a certain respect both passionate and yet laid back about sourcing his materials. His art is shaped by a generally positive attitude and an absence of ostensible irony. The "SAFARI" sculpture dominates the main exhibition room. It is a billboard based on the South American advertising hoardings which Wöhrl observed while visiting Mexico City. Here it is composed of panels, equal in size but varying in colour. The result is a colourful pattern, interspersed with fragments of letters and pictures, which resembles a "find the hidden pictures" game. Little monkeys peep out from the picture fragments; the letters make up the title of the piece "SAFARI". The associations implied here - whether childlike curiosity and enthusiastic play, or voyages of discovery and a thirst for adventure - can also be applied to Wöhrl's confident idea of contemporary sculpture. Martin Wöhrl was born in Munich in 1974. He studied with James Reinking at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts in the 1990s. He is the recipient of the Newcomer's Prize at the Munich Academy, the Bavarian Staatsförderpreis award, a DAAD stipend for Glasgow and a stipend from the state of Bavaria to visit the USA. He most recently exhibited at the 2006 Berlin Biennial (Young Bavarian Art at Gagosian Berlin) and in the VISTAZO exhibition in the Museo d'Arte Carillo Gil, Mexico City. Image: Martin Wöhrl Amore, 2007 wood 202 x 800 x 30 cm Courtesy of Monika Sprüth Philomene Magers, Munich Sprüth Magers Projekte, Munich Read on...Sprüth Magers Projekte, Munich

I-20 New York Timothy Hutchings The World's Largest Wargaming Table 27 June - 11 Aug 2007 For I-20's summer show, Timothy Hutchings has created The World's Largest Wargaming Table, an installation stretching throughout the gallery that comments on history and technology, abstraction and site, while pondering the subject of war and hobbies. Hutchings's installation is a functional super-sized war game table (400 square feet), made of MDF, wood and carved styrofoam, that complies with mapping criteria and can be used by serious game players: a working surface for soldier figurines governed by battle rules. The World's Largest Wargaming Table is a continuation of Hutchings's obsessions with the past, ideal places, and the logic of war, but without the technology of his faux 8-millimeter films like The Arsenal at Danzig and Other Views (2001), in which destroyed Eastern European landmarks were brought back to life in fake period films shot by tourists; and in Player vs. Player (2004), with its black humor when a mountain climber turns upon his companion after reaching an alpine summit. In A Lark in the Larkin (2005), a destroyed Buffalo landmark made by Frank Lloyd Wright was brought to life in a faux war recruiting film disguised as a silent musical and dancing extravaganza. The new installation is about territory, warfare, minimalism and the charm of the miniature. It's an art object as well as a gaming surface awaiting action, and only activated as such when it is being used. There will be an accompanying edition of silk-screen prints, Caverns of Ouroboros - E2, that are loosely based on the game maps that were included with Dungeons and Dragons, and which are definitely tied to the idea of gaming and the table. Timothy Hutchings will have a solo exhibition at the Vienna Kunsthalle in 2008, and his work will be featured in "25 Years Later" at Art In General later this year. Other exhibitions include "Greater New York," "Some Young New Yorkers," and "B-Hotel" at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center; "Videodrome II," New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; "Metropolis Now," Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid; and "SUBMERGE, Kunstebunker Forum für Zeitgenössische Kunst, Nürnberg, Germany. Hutchings was born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1974. He was educated at the Kansas City Art Institute, and received his MFA from the Yale University School of the Arts. He lives and works in New York. Image: Timothy Hutchings The World's Largest Wargaming Table 2006 Styrofoam and wood Dimensions Variable Courtesy of I-20 New York I-20 New York Read on... I-20 New York

SUNDAY, New York Jacques Louis Ramon Vidal Wood Folks is Good Folks (Cause Wood Folks Don't Go on the Internet and Spread a Bunch of Fucking Lies) 22 June - 22 July 2007 The Good People of SUNDAY are pleased to announce Wood Folks is Good Folks, the first New York solo show by Jacques Louis Ramon Vidal. Vidal's work has many of the characteristics of folk art - a rejection of academic technique, a preference for centralized or all-over compositions, and a prioritization of the local rather than the general. And yet his use of folk idioms has very little to do with the populist and wholesome values that underpin the majority of the work, which usually bears that name. His work is a complex intermingling of "wayward forms and subjects" treated with both reverence and skepticism. Vidal follows the logic of his cultural material to the letter, allowing the works to create themselves. But this strategy of "truth to material" has a very different result in his work than it did in the work of the purist sculptors and architects who initially advanced the idea as a method. Vidal's cultural materials are contaminated to begin with, having developed lives of their own before he got to them, and which he generously allows them to keep. He strategically avoids what might be referred to in the art world as appropriation, instead taking his cues from the sub- cultural subjects he investigates. This is the documentary aspect of the work. But, unlike the traditional "objective" documentary of folkloric traditions, Vidal's work eschews the institutional archiving impulse and opts for a participatory role, preserving the weirdness and ambiguity of his subjects. Sometimes this takes the form of devotional objects, as in his collages. Other times they seem to be promotional objects: provisional sculptures created to promote some sort of attraction or live act, as in the albino alligator head. Still other times the subject itself remains obscure and the material means are studied and adopted from regional traditions, as in his hinged wooden mannequin works that seem to refer to rural handmade children's toys. The performances in which he employs these objects as props are a pastiche of storytelling, salesmanship, and circus barking. Like a twisted town crier, Vidal explains the logic and narrative behind his objects. In the undocumented "Diagram of the Internet" he relates a story from his adolescence about his experiences with chat rooms. Moving from one transparent plastic room to the other, Vidal covers himself in mud from a bucket and then washes it off using suds from an identical bucket. This, he claims, is a metaphor for the wholesome and unwholesome aspects of the Internet. In a combination of scripted material and improvisatory gestures, the performance illuminates a pair of large head-inprofile shaped collages behind him on the wall. One is composed of people covered in mud, taken from photographs of mud wrestling, and the other of people covered in soap bubbles, taken from fraternity "suds-parties". Jacques Vidal takes what is best from regional traditions: their mystery, their iconoclasm, and their agency, exposing and documenting them in their own languages. This in turn has the implicit effect of revealing the "regional" aspects of all cultural production, and exposing the multiplicity of historical trajectories within an institutional culture of modernism whose agendas have dictated that these should be swept under the rug. - Justin Lieberman, Artist Jacques Louis Ramon Vidal (b. 1982, Columbus, OH) lives and works in Chicago, IL. He is an MFA candidate at Yale University School of Art, New Haven, CT and received a BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston MA. His work has been included in exhibitions at the LaMontagne Gallery in Boston, MA; Dam Stuhltrager Gallery in Brooklyn, NY; and the Metro Mall in Queens, NY; among others. His work has been reviewed in the New York Times. Wood Folks is Good Folks is the artist's first New York solo show. Vidal's interests include Sugar Free Red Bull, wood (of all kinds) and working part-time at the Burger King. Image: Jacques Louis Ramon Vidal Courtesy of SUNDAY, New York SUNDAY, New York Read on... SUNDAY, New York

Krobath Wimmer, Vienna Igor Eskinja 20 June - 28 July 2007 Igor Eskinja inclines towards a trend of visual art creators that follow a principle of minimalism and scantiness in their choice of materials and expression. His own works are characterized by the perfection of production. Since the end of the 1990s, and in various exhibition spaces, Eskinja has been authoring installations that were of temporary character. Minimally intervening by reduced means upon the wall or the gallery floor (applications made of adhesive tape, wall papers, stickers, dust...) he created spatial installations which lasted for as long as the actual exhibition. By using expendable materials and by temporariness of the exhibitions, he demystifies the status of the institutional space and attaches bigger importance to the process of the observer's perception, rather than to the existence of a permanent art object. A figurative flat depiction has been conceived in order to problematize spatial relations, while activation of the observer's perception within a given and real space opens up a certain new spatial situation, a space within the space. The observer is demanded to visually read i.e. to locate, discern and decipher the data gained in a process of visual perception and reflection i.e. active relation. Eskinja's interest is not exclusively focused on the problems of visual form, perception, spatial and symbolic redefining of the gallery space, but also on problematizing the complex communication relations within art world. In this manner he questions, often with a bit of irony, the intricate relations arising from the interaction between observer/consumer and artwork, the manners of artwork presentation and the meaning of gallery space's functioning. Inside the exhibition space, he carefully creates a two- dimensional installation of an object, a sort of which can be found around us on everyday basis (boxes, waiting-rooms seats, a microphone, folders from a commuter screen...). A two-dimensional image (thanks to reflection and the outstanding knowledge of the laws of perception) is construed in such a way that an observer perceives it as the three-dimensional object. The next stage comprises photographing the object, after which the artist applies a state-of-the-art technology to produce a photo, subsequently placed beneath plexiglas. Eventually he exhibits the final product, a perfectly balanced art object which - to the observer's eye - constantly provokes a tension between charms of illusion, polysemy and simplicity. Actually, thanks to a skill of sophisticated perception, the observer will reveal and recognize artwork's multidimensionality. A possibility of arising of a communication relation between observer and artwork necessarily presumes the former's active participation. Producing the work that has a character of durability can be interpreted as a progress in direction of surpassing the gallery space. This process can be regarded as the author's peculiar liberation from the givens and frameworks of an institutional space, and as a new phase of creation, moving into a new realm of the open possibilities. Natasa Ivanèeviæ Image: Igor Eskinja Installation at Krobath Wimmer Courtesy of Krobath Wimmer, Vienna Krobath Wimmer, Vienna Read on...Krobath Wimmer, Vienna

Frith Street Gallery, London POLLY APFELBAUM Love Sculpture 29 June - 17 Aug 2007 Frith Street Gallery is pleased to announce the first one-person exhibition of New York artist Polly Apfelbaum in the UK. Apfelbaum's work consists primarily of large-scale installations which cover vast portions of museum or gallery floors. Described by the artist as "fallen paintings" these works are hybrids, poaching in fields already seemingly well defined, twisting categories into different forms. As critic Lane Reylea has written: "Apfelbaum's work is both painting and sculpture, and perhaps photography and fashion and formless material process as well. It is all these things-wildly so and wildly not so." Apfelbaum's installations are highly ephemeral in nature; at the end of an exhibition the pieces are dismantled - never to be reconstituted in the same way again. She embraces the phenomenological effects of Minimal and post-Minimal art but is equally concerned with the power of colour to produce emotion. In this series, there is a greater concern with the graphic quality of drawing, the arc of the hand, the liquidity of the stain and the weight of the line. The two floor based works in this exhibition almost fill the entire gallery. "The Painted Desert" runs the full length of the space. This piece is composed of square sections of fabric in orange and pink, each square a separate painting covered with abstract black expressionistic lines in different geometric compositions. The colour shifts as the viewer walks along the edge of the work. A "cheap magic" from dark to light is created by the direction of the nap of the fabric. The other piece in the gallery, "Green Space" takes the form of a wedge of lurid green fabric described by the artist as a monochromatic, artificial, glowing, urban flower patch. Polly Apfelbaum was born in 1955 in Abington, Pennsylvania and has lived and worked in New York city since 1978. Recent exhibitions include Comic Abstraction at MoMA, New York, Extreme Abstraction at the Albright Knox Museum, Buffalo, NY,The Shape of Color at Art Gallery of Ontario, and Like Color in Pictures at the Aspen Musuem of Art. A mid-career survey, initiated by the ICA in Philadelphia, traveled 2003-4. Recent solo shows include Love Streetat Angles Gallery, Los Angeles 2007 and Love Craft at Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, Virginia. Image: POLLY APFELBAUM Painted Desert 2007 39 synthetic fabric squares and dye, 127 x 127 cm each 20 x 4.77 m Courtesy the artist and Frith Street Gallery, London Frith Street Gallery, London Read on...Frith Street Gallery, London

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