re-title.com Features

Arts Council England Own Art Scheme

 

 

Galleries in England invited to apply for membership to the Own Art scheme!

Closing date: 26 April 2010

 

Arts Council England’s Own Art scheme is currently taking applications from galleries based in England who would like to apply for membership.

 

Own Art is designed to make it easy and affordable for everyone to buy original, high quality contemporary art and craft. Customers can borrow up to £2,000, or as little as £100, to be paid back in equal instalments over a period of 10 months - interest free.

 

The scheme is available through selected galleries across England specialising in the sale of contemporary art and craft. To be eligible for membership, galleries must have been trading for a minimum of 12 months, hold (or be willing to apply for) a Consumer Credit Licence and operate a UK bank account capable of accepting payment by BACS.

 

Membership of the scheme is also open to art colleges and universities in England, for the promotion and sale of work by graduates at their degree shows and to other appropriate establishments such as artist co-operatives and studio groups.

 

The application period to become a member of the scheme is now open. The closing date for the receipt of completed applications is 26 April 2010.

 

To apply for membership of the Own Art scheme your gallery must be based in England.

 

Please visit our website www.ownart.org.uk where you will find details of how to apply or email [email protected] and ask for an application pack.

 

Arts Council England is the national development agency for the arts. We want the arts to be at the heart of our national life. Providing interest free loans is one of the ways we encourage people throughout England to experience and enjoy art of the highest quality.

 

 

Galerie Stefan Röpke, Cologne

 

Lorenz Estermann
"Public Hyperbindings"

 

March 13 - April 17, 2010

 

We are pleased to announce Public Hyperbindings, the first solo exhibition by Austrian artist Lorenz Estermann at Galerie Stefan Röpke.

 

Conceptual mixed media approaches involving painting, sculpture, photography, architecture, design and typography guide the work of Austrian artist Lorenz Estermann. The range of his focus varies from collage-like works on paper, three-dimensional architectural models and installations, derived from actual pieces of architecture from the 1960's and 1970's with a sense of ironic distance. Estermann finds his motifs and themes while engaged in his photographic research projects, which the artist carries out in the suburbs, industrial zones, and other locations in Central and Eastern Europe where a variety of styles of architecture and construction exist side by side.

 

His works are both serious and humorous critiques and analyses of the great modern utopias, yet they also relate to Pop Art and its exploration of mass consumption and everyday phenomena.

 

Lorenz Estermann was born in Linz, Austria, in 1968. He works and lives in Linz and Vienna. In 2009 his works were exhibited among others in the "LENTOS Kunstmuseum" in Linz, the Künstlerhaus in Dortmund and in JP Morgan Chase Art Collection, New York. In 2008 he participated in "The Peekskill Project, New York" and was part of the "New Talents" at Art Cologne.

 

Image:
Lorenz Estermann
"Fun-tower", 2009
mixed media paint on plywood and cardboard /
Mischtechnik-Malerei auf Sperrholz und Pappe
height: 24,4 inches / Höhe: 62 cm
Courtesy of Galerie Stefan Röpke

 

 

GALERIE STEFAN RÖPKE
St. Apern-Strasse 17-21
50667 Cologne
Germany
+49 221 255559

GALERIE STEFAN RÖPKE

 

Read On... Galerie Stefan Röpke, Cologne 

 

 

Galerie Barbara Thumm, Berlin

 

MARIELE NEUDECKER

 

February 27 - April 24, 2010

 

We are pleased to present new work by Mariele Neudecker in her fifth solo-show at Galerie Barbara Thumm.

Stay Forever and Never Come Back, the central work by Mariele Neudecker in the exhibition, is conceived as a counterpoint to the otherwise so lofty character of here three-dimensional replicas of Romantic landscapes installed in tanks filled with water and dye, and meanwhile holding the status of the artist's trademark.

 

Inspired by Henry James's famous ghost story The Turn of the Screw as well as by Benjamin Britten's opera version of the same name, Mariele Neudecker's new model - entitled Stay Forever and Never Come Back - depicts a houseless, homeless setting abandoned to decay. Ruins with blank window openings, missing roofs and collapsed walls as well as the remains of a tree skeleton stretching barrenly skyward define the dismal scenery. The main building resembles that of a former, now abandoned, brewery in Aldeburgh, England. The work was executed during Mariele Neudecker's residency there, an opportunity offered exclusively to artists devoted primarily to the visual realization of classical music. Three videos on monitors are positioned at the edges of the architectural sculpture at table height. Landscape scenes filmed by the artist herself, for example the smooth surface of a lake into which a stone falls now and then, are superimposed with sequences from the English horror film The Innocents of 1961 by Jack Clayton. The latter is a film adaptation of the novella by Henry James, in which two innocent orphans are supposedly possessed by evil spirits. In the video, the two figures hazily appear and disappear again. As in the work Everything is Important and Nothing Matters, much attention has been devoted here to staging the viewer's gaze: windows, doors and rooms open up numerous perspectives onto the individual video images. Mariele Neudecker used Benjamin Britten's composition to create a strongly distorted, fragmented soundtrack generously interspersed with moments of ominous silence.

 

As was already the case in her multipartite room installation on Gustav Mahler's Kindertotenlieder, in which music and image are interwoven to striking effect, Mariele Neudecker once again creates a suggestive visual and acoustic framework for the depiction of landscapes of the soul. Whereas in her depictions of nature, the gradual discolouration of the water in the glass cases serves the purposes of atmospheric condensation, here it is the interplay between the emotional power of the music, the cinematic images and the symbolic setting which evokes an imaginary event. In the manner of a "mind map", the installation provides various pieces of evidence which join to form a richly associative whole, while at the same time permitting no definitive conclusions. By overlapping fiction and reality, the installation also continually points to its own artificial and constructed quality.

 

In her artistic practise, Mariele Neudecker is consistently concerned with optical and psychological phenomena, i.e. with the shifting of perspectives - an approach clearly exemplified by her mirrored video installation Only the Past. Here the gaze into a puddle, its contours alluded to on the model of a polled tree trunk, takes on the same meaning as the contemplation of passing clouds and icy landscapes - though, surprisingly, from flight perspective.

A metaphor of vision per se are the two glass balls in the work 4.7km = 3 Miles or 2.5 Nautical Miles. Each containing an upside-down model of a lighthouse towering into the clouds, they are reminiscent of a pair of eyes radiating light and at the same time reflecting it. An antithesis is formed by the replicas of two flight recorders, whose contents - the Final Fantasy - are not revealed by their impermeable black casing.

 

Text: Angelika Richter

 

Image:

MARIELE NEUDECKER
Stay Forever and Never Come Back (detail)
2009, Mixed media incl. wood, concrete, metal, fibre-glass, digital screens and sound
Commissioned by Aldeburgh Music

175 x 190  x 151 cm

Courtesy of Galerie Barbara Thumm, Berlin

 

Galerie Barbara Thumm
Markgrafenstrasse 68
D-10969 Berlin
+ 49/30/283 90 347

 

Galerie Barbara Thumm 

 

Read On... Galerie Barbara Thumm, Berlin 

 

 

Gooden Gallery, London

 

 

TimeScale
IAN JOHNSON

 

March 19th - May 9th 2010

 

'TimeScale' continues Ian Johnson's enquiry into the conceptual and physical implications of man's impact on the urban and natural landscape and ways that this can be configured intuitively. It consists of inter-related sculptures, drawings and assemblages that interlace attributes of the elemental with various concepts of organisation and categorisation common to man's need to understand his own history and development.

 

Cultural anthropologists studying cultural diversity, collect data on the impact of global economic and political processes on local cultural realities. The empirical purity of knowledge gained when the standard model for measurement can only really come from within the single cultural reality of the observer, reveals the complexity and questionable objectivity of any conclusions drawn. Johnson works not from the assumption that sense can ever be made from his own enquiry but rather that sense can be 'felt'.

 

Methods of presenting artefacts in museums; the classification and ordering of exhibits in an attempt to explain a culture or plot a history, is referenced in the drawing 'Timescale (light box #1) ' which provokes contemplation and quiet objectivity. The tabletop sculpture with carefully positioned, painted black seeds entitled 'Badlands' (In the gallery window) assumes a long-lost logic. It is an aberration of modern taxonomy; a perverse panorama for some ulterior game-plan. Placed around the walls, the three small sculptures - 'Untitled #1 (Ash) ' / 'Untitled #2 (Steel) ' and 'Untitled #3 (Oil) ' could be interpreted as offerings, altar-like objects which have an imperative of origin and meaning beyond immediate grasp, but which provide acute points of concentration formally and conceptually around the room.

 

In contrast to these objects, which celebrate unavailability, detachment and mystery, the large branch-like forms that dominate the gallery provide a tangible subjective experience. The semi-chaotic over-lay of forms, stacked, strewn and positioned on the floor and partially climbing the walls, creates a sense of location, an apocalyptic landscape. Titled 'Crosswire (Antenna) ' they are a caricature of nature, over-simplistic and clearly man-made; a visual confessional.

 

Image:
Ian Johnson / TimeScale

Installation view Gooden Gallery, London

 

GOODEN GALLERY
25A Vyner St
London E2 9DG
+44 020 8981 1233

 

GOODEN GALLERY 

 

Read On... GOODEN GALLERY, London 

 

 

NILS STÆRK, Copenhagen

 

 

JONE KVIE
EVERYTHING FALLING INTO PLACE

 

March 20 - May 1, 2010

 

Gigantic collections of stars, gas and dust clouds form the nebulae of the universe, the basis for the creation of our solar system more than four billion years ago. These star factories of the universe, the nearest one 1,300 light years away, are both unattainable and unfathomable in their powerful boundlessness.

Based on photos from the Hubble and the Chandra telescopes Jone Kvie has demarcated the otherwise abstract forms to concrete physical reproductions in a number of new sculptures of wood pulp with the shared title Sculpted Gas. With these works he maintains his interest in depicting natural forms and phenomena and man's relationship with them.

The scale and material of the sculptures give a lightness and a feeling of fragility that contrast with the monumental objects they depict. By presenting the nebulae like sculptural objects one of the greatest forces in the universe suddenly seems manageable and tangible. This inherent duality in Jone Kvie's sculptures points to man's need to rationally understand the universe, but also to the impossibility of this. Our reason, which says that all objects have an end, collides with our fantasy about the infinity of the universe. The sublime is put on the agenda, and nature is acknowledged as the stronger.

 

While the sculptures in Sculpted Gas send us many light years out into space, we are drawn back to Earth with the work Untitled, where four tree roots, shaped in German silver, stand fused and frozen on the gallery floor. With the roots planted deep in the earth, they seem to ground us in our own concrete reality, but the hollowed-out stumps with an inside lining of black pigment let us fall back into the nothingness of the black holes of the universe.

 

Jone Kvie (b. 1971) has in recent years shown his works in venues such as Sörlandets Kunstmuseum, Norway; Krannert Art Museum, Illinois; The Beijing Biennial; Kunsti Museum of Modern Art, Finland; The Wanås Foundation, Sweden; Charro Negro Galeria, Mexico; I - 20 Galleries, New York. Until May 1st Jone Kvie will present his solo show H II Region at Elastic in Malmø, Sweden.

 

Image:
Jone Kvie

Everything Falling into Place
Installation view
Nils Stærk Contemporary Art, Copenhagen

 

NILS STÆRK 
NY CARLSBERG VEJ 68
DK-1760 COPENHAGEN V
+45 3254 4562

 

NILS STÆRK

 

Nils Stærk, Copenhagen 

 

 

Stefan Müller. Hang zur Neigung at Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden

 

Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden
Lichtentaler Allee 8a
76530 Baden-Baden
Germany
Tel. +49 (0)7221-300763

www.kunsthalle-baden-baden.de

 

 

Stefan Müller. Hang zur Neigung

 

Sat. 27. 03. – 24. 05. 2010

Press conference: Thu. 25. 03. 2010, 11 pm

Opening: Fri. 26. 03. 2009, 19 pm

 

Tuesday to Sunday 11-18 h
Thursday 11-19 h

 

 

Stefan Müller
I’m against it, 2000
Acrylic on nettle
80 x 100 cm / 31.5 x 39.4’’
Photo: Ludger Paffrath, Berlin

 

 

Central to Stefan Müller’s (b. 1973) approach to his art are the engagement with painting and the question of what its formal significance may yet be for the present, after the problems raised by Conceptual Art and Minimal Art. Employing a minimalist approach, Müller explores the picture, often considering it finished at the earliest possible moment. Framing and stretching the canvas and leaving minimal traces that seem to be the products of accident are often enough to form a complete picture.

 

Müller’s painting is distinguished by a reduced choice of materials, motifs, and colors. He paints on untreated canvas, cotton fabric, or used fabrics such as bed sheets, which he exposes to accidental modification before and during the act of painting. Beer stains, ashes, dust, coffee, or blood often replace the conventional varnish. His palette of materials ranges from acrylic, transparent lacquers, oil, and silicone to markers, pencils, and crayons. He also integrates banal elements such as dirt, tissue paper, confetti, and glitter into his works.

 

 

 

 

Stefan Müller
Jaki Liebezeit, 2001
Acrylic on canvas
135 x 100 cm / 53,1 x 39.4’’
Photo: Simon Vogel, Cologne

 

 

In the pictures from the early 2000s, Stefan Müller is still palpably torn by the conflict between representational and abstract painting. Giraffes rambling across the canvas or a drum kit dissolve into abstract patterns of color. Yet Müller soon develops a formal vocabulary comprising circles, spheres, lines, and rectangular fields that pervade his work to this day. Curls become the I, circles represent the thoughts incessantly spinning in the artist’s head. Titles such as Total total Confusion, Aua, aua, armes Universum, Zu lange in die Sonne geschaut, and Empire of Dirt add another layer of meaning to these paintings.

 

 

 

 

Stefan Müller
Ohne Titel, 2005
Various fabrics, sewn
210 x 140 cm / 82.7 x 55.1"
Photo: Wolfgang Günzel, Offenbach

 

 

The protagonists of Minimal Art confidently resisted the traditional expressive means of painting and sculpture. Trademarks of their three-dimensional works include an extremely reduced formal language, modern industrial materials such as plywood, aluminium, and fluorescent tubes, and the removal of anything suggesting the artist’s individual hand. The products of American Color Field painting are defined exclusively by visual illusionism, negating the traditional representational function of painting. Palermo’s fabric paintings likewise categorically eliminate the personal artistic signature. His pictures made of dyed panels of fabric, having lost all painted materiality, are radically reduced to the impression of color.

 

 

 

 

Stefan Müller
Enzian, 2006
Acrylic, lacquer and shellac on nettle
150 x 150 cm / 59.1 x 59.1"
Photo: Ludger Paffrath, Berlin

 

 

If Müller begins in the mid-2000s to develop a form of painting without painting by transforming fabrics of various composition, size, and color into works of art in a purely additive process, this must certainly be considered a reference to Minimal Art. Mistakes and ruptures often mark Müller’s fabric paintings, implying the Romantic notion of failure. The chronological arrangement of his pictures at the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden illustrates how Müller constantly rethinks and reinvents painting. Stefan Müller’s roots are in painting, which he questions with a variety of formal instruments and methods; in his most recent paintings, he has found his own striking and distinctive visual language.

 

 

 

 

Stefan Müller
Blossoms like Blisters – Boredom’s my Sister, 2009
Fabric, colored, acrylic, marker
165 x 135 cm / 65 x 53.1’’
Photo: Wolfgang Günzel, Offenbach

 

 

The exhibition "Stefan Müller. Hang zur Neigung" shows about 40 paintings from 2000 until 2010.

The catalogue with essays by Thomas Bayrle, Hans-Jürgen Hafner, Karola Kraus and Julia Wirxel, is published by Distanz Verlag, Berlin, 160 p., Hardcover, German/English, € 29.90; in bookshop € 39.90; ISBN 978-3-89955-407-6

 

 

www.kunsthalle-baden-baden.de

Royal College of Art, London

 

 

John Smith | Solo Show

 

19 March - 13 April 2010
(Closed 1 - 6 April)

 

The Royal College of Art is pleased to present a survey exhibition of John Smith's practice with supporting programme of talks and events.

 

For the first time in the 18-year history of the RCA Curating Contemporary Art MA programme, final year students have decided to present a solo exhibition as their graduate project. Opening on 19 March, this will be the largest UK show by the pioneering east London based artist and filmmaker John Smith.

 

Much loved for their wit, formal ingenuity and use of storytelling, Smith's films are as much influenced by the humour of Monty Python as the theories of avant-garde filmmaking. Acknowledging that much of Smith's work has rarely been shown in a gallery context, a comprehensive selection will be shown together in the RCA galleries.

 

This exhibition offers an opportunity for Smith to return to the RCA where he began making films as a student in the 1970s.  The artist will work closely with the students to create an exhibition that reveals the multiple sensibilities which run throughout his practice.  Rarely seen early films will be shown in the company of more recent work and the exhibition design will emphasise the narrative and structural devices used within Smith's work.

 

Accompanying the exhibition will be a new catalogue on Smith's practice with critical texts, an extended interview with the artist and a visual essay. A second publication will follow in June focusing on the solo show as an exhibition format.  Comprised of research through interviews and historical analysis it will also reflect on the making of the exhibition and include documentation of Smith's work.

 

The programme of events complementing the show will provide in-depth reflection on individual works. There will be three discussion based events, focussing on The Black Tower (Wednesday 24 March, 7pm), Slow Glass (Monday 29 March, 7pm), and Hotel Diaries (Thursday 8 April, 7pm).

 

The programme will also include Doug Fishbone  (Sunday 21 March, 2pm), Jarvis Cocker (Saturday 27 March, 2pm), Darian Leader (Friday 9 April, 2pm), John Smith & Laure Prouvost (Sunday 11 April, 2pm), and a screening of John Smith's documentary film Hackney Marshes (TV version), followed by a full length screening of Hotel Diaries (Monday 12 April, 4pm).

 

All events are free but limited capacity, to book a place please RSVP to: [email protected]

 

John Smith was born in London in 1952 and studied film at the Royal College of Art.  Since 1972 he has made over forty film, video and installation works that have been shown in cinemas, art galleries and on television throughout the world and awarded major prizes at many international film festivals. His solo exhibitions include Ikon Gallery, Birmingham (2006), Kunstmuseum Magdeburg (2005), Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool (2003) and Pearl Gallery, London (2003).  He regularly presents his work in person and in recent years it has been profiled through retrospectives at the 2007 Venice Biennale and film festivals in Oberhausen, Cork, Tampere, Uppsala, Bristol, Regensburg, Glasgow and La Rochelle. John Smith lives and works in London. He teaches part-time at the University of East London where he is Professor of Fine Art. He is represented by Tanya Leighton Gallery in Berlin and his work is distributed by LUX, London.

 

 

Image:
John Smith
Frozen War (from the Hotel Diaries series) video still, 2001
Courtesy of the artist, Tanya Leighton Gallery, Berlin and LUX, London.

 

 

Royal College of Art Galleries
Kensington Gore
London SW7 2EU

Free admission
Open daily 11am - 5.30pm

+44 (0)20 7590 4444

 

Read On... John Smith at the Royal College of Art, London 

 

 

Kate MacGarry, London

 

 

BEN RIVERS

 

12 March - 2 May 2010

 

For his first exhibition at the gallery Ben Rivers has assembled a dwelling from discarded and reclaimed building materials. Inside, his film Origin of the Species (2008) offers a clandestine portrait of an elderly man living in a ramshackle cottage in the wilderness of the Scottish highlands. The man devises his own technologies for day-to-day subsistence while pondering the workings of the universe and the scope of human knowledge. Although there seems a vast discrepancy between Big Bang theory and animal trapping, the voiceover forays into such grand universals as evolution and epistemology, bridging this gap through ruminations on the experience of nature.

 

Rivers' film is made using an old Bolex camera, which imparts a quality that cannot be digitally constructed. At times the blissed-out end of a reel is left apparent as errant bursts of yellow and orange light obliterate the image. Scratches similarly draw us back to the film's surface and emphasise the mechanical nature of its coming into being. Just as the man wonders at the destructive results of the too-quick evolution of the human brain, the near-obsolescence of film confirms this pace of change; and as his retreat from civilisation takes on the characteristics of an idyll, Rivers' own shack reminds us of the awkward reality of this.

 

Origin of the Species is unflinchingly beautiful, without irony or sentimentality. As an artist working with film, though, Rivers is careful to put its nostalgic qualities to more testing use. His studies of the contingent lives of others are as much to do with investigative anthropology as they are utopian escapism.

 

Ben Rivers born Somerset 1972, lives and works in London.
Rivers' previous solo exhibitions in the UK include: A World Rattled of Habit at A Foundation, Liverpool, 2009; Slow Action/Origin of the Species, Picture This, Bristol, 2009; On Overgrown Paths, Permanent Gallery, Brighton and The Regency Town House, Hove, 2008. In 2008 his work was screened as part of Nought to Sixty, at the ICA, London and at the 52nd BFI London Film Festival.
Rivers won the Tiger Award at the 2008 International Film Festival Rotterdam and is recipient of the London Artist Film and Video Award (LAFVA).

Origin of the Species was funded by Arts Council England, with the support of Film London Artists' Moving Image Network. Thanks to Measure (www.measure.org.uk) and A Foundation, Liverpool.

 

Image:
Ben Rivers
Origin of the Species 2008
16mm film, duration: 16 minutes
Courtesy of Kate MacGarry, London

 

 

Kate MacGarry
7a Vyner Street
E2 9DG
London
+44 (0) 20 8981 9100

Wed - Sun, 12-6pm

 

Kate MacGarry

 

Read On... Kate MacGarry, London

 

 

Galeria Espacio Minimo, Madrid

 

SERGEY BRATKOV
Male Games

 

February 19th to April 1st, 2010

 

An image from Misanthrope, SERGEY BRATKOV's previous exhibition in this gallery, is his starting point for new work in which he depict his native Ukraine. Thsi new work is what makes up Male Games, his third exhibition at Espacio Minimo.

The exhibition shows a selection of large format panoramic photographs in the gallery's first room, with the remaining images in the series being projected in the basement room. Through these images BRATKOV performs a narrative journey through contemporary Ukraine, capturing the country's unusual and surreal beauty with no recourse to digital manipulation, thus showing the real transformation it has gone through in recent years.

 

With this work the artists shows the cultural and economic changes that have occurred in Ukraine. Thorugh personal stories, and without abandoning his previous works' characteristic sense of humour, he documents its specific reality and the peculiarity of its inhabitants.

 

The show is completed with a projection in the gallery's main space of the video Endless War, a powerful metaphor of the other male "game" which, via an endless video loop, the artist uses to make a powerful political comment. The emptiness of the soldiers' helmets, loudly hitting against the floor, makes evident the absence of human forms, giving the images a simultaneous feeling of nostalgia and absurdity.

 

As is the norm with BRATKOV's work his reflections about social structures, ever-changing in a transitive country like Ukraine, create a provocative body of socially engaged work.

 

 

 

SERGEY BRATKOV (Kharkov, Ukraine, 1960) Lives and works in Moscow. From 1970 to 1978 he studied at Repin Art
College in Kharkov, and from 1978 to 1983 he attended the Polytechnical Academy in the same city. From 1994 to 1997 he
was a part of the Fast Reaction Group along with Boris Mikhailov, Vita Mikhailova and Sergey Solonsky. He represented Russia in the 50th and 52nd Venice Bienale, at the 25th Sao Paulo Bienal, at Manifesta 5 in San Sebastian, and at the first two Bienals in Moscow. He has had solo shows at important museums and public institutions such as Kunstverein Rosenheim in Rosenheim (Germany, 2002), Centre for Contemporary Art in Kiev (Ukraine, 2003), S.M.A.K. Museum de Gante (Belgium, 2005), Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow (Russia, 2006), Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead (United Kingdom, 2007), Fotomuseum Winterthur in Winterthur (Switzerland, 2008) and Pinchuk Art Centre in Kiev (Ukraine, 2010) as well as being part of distinguished collective shows in museums, institutions, and art centre across the world.

 

His work is included in the collections of MuKKA Museum of Contemporary Art in Antwerp (Belgium), Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb (Croatia), Museum of Photography in Boston (U.S.A.), Zimmerli Art Museu in New Brunswick, New Jersey (U.S.A.), Museum of Contemporary Art in Milwaukee (U.S.A.), S.M.A.K. Museum of Contemporary Art de Gante (Belgiuim), MARTa Herford Museum of Contemporary Art in Herford (Germany), Centro Gallego de Arte Contemporanea in Santiago de Compostela (Spain), Pinchuk Art Centre in Kiev (Ukraine) or Ekaterina Fundation in Moscú (Russia), amongst other important public collections.

 
Images:
Sergey Bratkov, Peaceful City, 2009
Color photograph, Edition of 5
82 x 220 cms

Sergey Bratkov, Provider, 2009
Color photograph, Edition of 5
82 x 220 cms
Courtesy of Galeria Espacio Minimo, Madrid

 

GALERÍA ESPACIO MÍNIMO
Doctor Fourquet, 17
Doctor Fourquet, 24
28012 Madrid
+34 91 4676 156

GALERÍA ESPACIO MÍNIMO

Read On... GALERÍA ESPACIO MÍNIMO, Madrid

 

 

Team Gallery, New York

 

 

Ryan McGinley

Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere

 

18 March - 17 April 2010

Team is pleased to present an exhibition of new work by the New York-based photographer Ryan McGinley. Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere will run from the 18th of March through the 17th of April 2010. Team Gallery is located at 83 Grand Street, cross streets Wooster and Greene, on the ground floor.

 

For his latest exhibition, Ryan McGinley has shifted his focus away from constructing a youthful sublime within the boundless American landscape and has concentrated instead on creating imagery within the confines of his New York studio. The result is a surprisingly restrained, open-ended study of black and white portraiture. Here we see McGinley not as a chronicler of youthful adventure, but as an engine for an almost scientific cataloging of a kind of emotional optimism.

McGinley's portraits are the result of a meticulous studio practice, in which thousands of images are taken of each sitter; each shoot eventually being edited down to its one defining "moment". During the course of two years, McGinley photographed about 150 hand-picked subjects from across the globe. Bringing these models into his studio and stripping them of their clothing, the artist has succeeded in answering his own question: "What would a classical Ryan McGinley black and white portrait look like?"

 

In this body of work, McGinley's subjects are not presented in an active outdoors; they are not shown within a locatable space - a place where image conjures memory - rather, these figures are suspended in an eternal artifice, a strategic nowhere, so that our attention rests solely on the sitters' state of mind. In this way the portraits can reflect back onto the viewer, becoming surrogates for emotional possibility. There is joy as well as uncertainty in these intimate photographs, and our access to the subjects and their interaction with the photographer seems limitless.

 

In addition to the black and white photographs, the exhibition will also include three large-scale images in color, which locate the other works within the continuity of McGinley's oeuvre. Characteristically exuberant, these photographs add a narrative backdrop to the exhibition, which initiates an ambiguous loop between the two approaches. McGinley's photographs have always mined the space between chaos and control, negotiating the space between the really-real and the only-apparently-so. In this exhibition the push and pull of nature and the studio, of sumptuous color and its absence, create a dynamic tension.

 

McGinley's photographs are included in the collections of The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C., and many others. The 33 year-old artist has had solo exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of Art and at PS1 in New York, at the MUSAC in Spain, and at the Kunsthalle Vienna. Last year McGinley had solo gallery shows in London and in Athens.

This is McGinley's third solo show at Team. A new monograph published by Dashwood Books will accompany the exhibition. Included is a conversation between McGinley and photographer Catherine Opie.

 

Image:
Victor
Ryan McGinley
2010, gelatin silver print, 12 x 18 inches, edition of three
Courtesy of Team Gallery, New York

 

Team Gallery
83 Grand Street
cross streets Wooster and Greene
New York, NY 10013
+1 212.279.9219

Team Gallery

Read On... Team Gallery, New York