re-title.com Features

JVA at JERWOOD SPACE, London

Glithero
Burn Burn Burn, 2011
Courtesy of the artists and Jerwood Visual Arts
 
 
FORMED THOUGHTS
Curated by Clare Twomey
 
18 January - 26 February 2012
 
Featuring: Phoebe Cummings, Glithero & Tracey Rowledge
 
Jerwood Visual Arts (JVA) presents the forthcoming exhibition in the Jerwood Encounters series.
 
Formed thoughts explores the fundamental collaboration between maker and material in the forming of concepts and works. Curator Clare Twomey brings together work by artists Phoebe Cummings, Glithero (Tim Simpson & Sarah van Gameren) and Tracey Rowledge to explore the active dialogue that materials provoke in the conception of new work and in its physical formation.
 
‘Material use is a given in the making of art and craft objects. In this curation I address the use of materials from artists who predominately make contributions to practice within the areas of material specific works, engaging the materials as co authors.' Clare Twomey, 2011
 
Works on display will include new work in Glithero's Burn Burn Burn series (previous work pictured), in which a flame travels over a path of flammable screen-printed paint, leaving behind it a charcoal trace which reveals the memory of a moment that has already passed. Phoebe Cummings' Vanitas explores the possibilities of clay as a raw material, disregarding notions of ceramics as a studio-based practice and as permanent possessions. Her installation will be constructed on site at Jerwood Space, where the work will be left to disintegrate and be broken down over the course of the exhibition. Tracey Rowledge will create new work for the exhibition, drawing directly onto the gallery wall over a 10-day period. Her solid graphite wall drawing, Surface, creates a reflective plane that captures and subdues the light and the movement in the gallery space.
 
Phoebe Cummings studied Three-Dimensional Crafts at the University of Brighton before completing an MA in Ceramics & Glass at the Royal College of Art in 2005. Since graduating she has undertaken a number of artist residencies, in the UK, USA and Greenland, including a three-month Arts/Industry residency at the Kohler Co. factory, Wisconsin in 2008 and six months as ceramics artist-in-residence at the V&A, London in 2010. Recent exhibitions include Down There Among The Roots, a joint exhibition with sound recordist Chris Watson, at Newlyn Art Gallery, and as part of 60|40 Starting Point Series 2011, where she created work in direct response to the architecture and activities of Siobhan Davies' Dance Studios in London. In October 2011, Phoebe Cummings was selected as the winner of the British Ceramics Biennial Award.
 
Studio Glithero is British designer Tim Simpson and Dutch designer Sarah van Gameren, who met and studied at the Royal College of Art. From their studio in London they create product, furniture and time-based installations that give birth to unique and wonderful products. The work is presented in a broad spectrum of mediums, but follows a consistent conceptual path; to capture and present the beauty in the moment things are made. In the past year Studio Glithero has presented solo shows in London, Paris and Rotterdam, as well as exhibitions in Spain, Milan, Berlin and Lisbon. In 2009 they were inaugurated into the Vauxhall Collective, were awarded the Crafts Council Maker Development Award and became visiting tutors at the Royal College of Art.
 
Tracey Rowledge studied Fine Art at Goldsmiths' College, London and Fine Bookbinding and Conservation at Guildford College of Further and Higher Education, Surrey. Her work has been shown internationally and is held in various private and public collections. She is a partner in Benchmark Bindery, established in 2009 with Kathy Abbott, to produce high quality and intelligent bookbinding work. She is a founding member of Tomorrow's Past, an international bookbinding collective and a founding member of the independent artists group 60|40, which was formed in 2008 with the ceramicist Clare Twomey and the silversmith David Clarke, to expand the environment and opportunities for the applied arts. Recent exhibitions include 60|40 at Gustavsberg Konsthall, Stockholm, Sweden and Siobhan Davies Commissions, London, UK, touring (2011) and U-N-F-O-L-D, Vienna, Austria, touring (2010).
 
Clare Twomey is a British artist and a research fellow at the University of Westminster who works with clay in large-scale installations, sculpture and site-specific works. Within her work Twomey maintains her concerns with materials, craft practice and historic and social context. She is actively involved in critical research in the area of the applied arts, including writing, curating and making.
 
Jerwood Visual Arts (JVA) is a contemporary gallery programme of awards, exhibitions and events at Jerwood Space, London and on tour nationally. Jerwood Visual Arts supports and showcases the work of talented emerging artists. It aims to make connections and provoke conversations within and across visual arts disciplines. A major initiative of the Jerwood Charitable Foundation.
 
Jerwood Encounters are one-off curated exhibitions which provide artists and curators with new exhibition opportunities and the chance to explore the issues and territories in the borderlands between the main disciplinary fields of the Jerwood Visual Arts programme. Previous exhibitions in the Encounters series have included Passing Thoughts and Making Plans (4 November - 13 December 2009), For the Sake of the Image (3 March - 1 April 2010) and TERRA (9 November - 11 December 2011).
 
 
JERWOOD SPACE
171 Union Street
London
SE1 OLN
T: + 44 (0) 20 7654 0171
 
JERWOOD VISUAL ARTS
 
Read On... JERWOOD SPACE, London

 

FRIEDRICH PETZEL GALLERY, New York

JOYCE PENSATO
Batman I, 2011
Enamel and metallic paint on linen
48 x 40 inches, 121.9 x 101.6 cm
Image Courtesy of Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York.
 
 
JOYCE PENSATO
Batman Returns
 
January 12 – February 25, 2012
 
Friedrich Petzel Gallery is pleased to announce "Batman Returns," the third exhibition of new work by the New York-based artist Joyce Pensato. An illustrated catalogue, published by 38th Street Publishers with an accompanying essay by Ira G. Wool, will be available on the occasion of the exhibition. The book commemorates the 32 years that the artist worked in her Olive Street studio in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn, before re-locating to a new space in the spring of 2011.
 
For this exhibition, Joyce Pensato uses "Batman" as the predominant subject and inspiration for her paintings. "Batman" is a motif that first appeared in Pensato's drawings as early as the mid-1970's and has been used by the artist only periodically since, the last "Batman" painting, as singular work, having been executed in 1996. Pensato's resurrection of this iconic image sixteen years later marks an additional shift in her practice as it will be the first time that she has added various colors to what until now has been a strictly black, white and silver painting palette. Pastel color has played a role in Pensato's drawings over the years, but color in the paintings is new, and as with her drawings, the color element marks a layer within, simultaneously erased and darkened by the profuse and continual saturation of black and white enamel.
 
Alongside Pensato's batman motif will be paintings and drawings incorporating her familiar cartoon imagery of clowns, Homer Simpson, Groucho Marx, Mickey Mouse, and a character the artist refers to as "The Juicer." Furthermore, she will present assemblages of toys, ephemera, and stuffed animals throughout the gallery and will show as well approximately fifteen to twenty photographs of striking tableaux of the aforementioned elements taken by the artist at various times of day and night in her former studio. Through these old and new mediums, Pensato continues her baleful transmutation of American cartoon culture - employing her fast, assured, and gestural hand to shed light on the arguable darkness lurking within our familiar Pop iconography. What lay beneath Batman's mask was, perhaps only for a moment, Bruce Wayne.
 
Joyce Pensato lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She has exhibited widely, including in exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; the St. Louis Art Museum; The Speed Museum of Art, Louisville; and The Cleveland Museum of Art. Her work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; The Dallas Museum of Art; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and the FRAC des Pays de la Loire, France, among others. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award and the Anonymous Was A Woman Award. She is a graduate of The New York Studio School.
 
 
FRIEDRICH PETZEL GALLERY
537 West 22nd Street
New York, NY 10011
T: +1 212-680-9467
 
FRIEDRICH PETZEL GALLERY
 
Read On... FRIEDRICH PETZEL GALLERY, New York

 

BURGH HOUSE, London

Richard Stone
the day will come
porcelain, wax
approx 15 x 5 x 3"
Courtesy of the artist
 
 
RICHARD STONE
a walk at dusk and dawn
 
26 - 29 January 2012, 12 - 5pm daily and by appointment
 
Richard Stone presents a showcase of new painting and sculptural works together for the first time at historic Burgh House, Hampstead, London.
 
Taking the figure and landscape as classical reference points, Stone presents something altogether different. Part apocalyptic, part sublime, cloaked figures face outwards towards landscapes they cannot see whilst landscapes disintegrate and reform as new transient vistas.
 
From Caspar David Friedrich through references to Turner, vanitas and superheroes, the exhibition includes visually delicate erased antique paintings and figures slowly engulfed in ghostly and seductive auras of amorphous  wax.
 
The surfaces of the paintings have been fractured and partly sanded away to reveal delicately coloured carcass planes or bones of the original paintings now left floating on the surfaces. With the original landscapes now barely visible, new landscapes are revealed instead, balanced precariously between former representation and pure conceptual abstraction.
 
Adopting traditionally heroic poses the accompanying figures have their features smoothed out, these once empty vessels cast as historical portraits or caricatures become plinths or supports for new sculptural forms, together through process new sculptures are revealed suggestive of a more contemporary anti-portraiture.
 
More about the artist:
Selected for the Threadneedle Prize and shortlisted for the Galerie8 Prize and Title Art Prize in 2011, Stone creates works which materialises in many forms from objects and installation through to site-specific works. These have been shown at Beaconsfield, La Scatola and Schwartz Gallery in London as well as at further galleries and sites in the UK and abroad.
 
What others say:
'Between light and dark, tangible and ungraspable, Richard Stone installs his spaceless sculptures where boundaries creep into their own limitlessness.' Writer, Chris Piezga
 
'Minimal but powerful works.' Curator, Aoife van Linden Tol
 
'An artist whose recent work has resonances of Felix Gonzalez-Torres's conceptual art and the Joy Division covers designed by Peter Saville.' Barnaby Tidman, jotta
 
'Richard Stone is an artist who has taken the contemporary obsession with death and developed the theme along much more interesting lines.' Joe Rudkin, flavorpill
 
Richard Stone:
www.richardstoneprojects.com
 
Burgh House and Hampstead Museum
New End Square
London NW3 1LT
Nearest Tube: Hampstead
www.burghhouse.org.uk

 

GALERIE SFEIR-SEMLER, Hamburg

Akram Zaatari
On Photography, People and Modern Times, 2010
Two channel synchronized HD projection, color, sound, 39 min., Edition 5 + 2 a.p.
Courtesy of Galerie Sfeir-Semler, Hamburg
 
 
AKRAM ZAATARI
THE END
 
20 January - 31 March 2012
 
Sfeir-Semler Gallery is happy to start the new year with an opening Friday 20th of January, 7-9 pm, of a solo show by the Lebanese artist, Akram Zaatari. This opening coincides with a common opening of all galleries on the Fleetinsel in Hamburg.
 
Zaatari's practice is tied to the practice of collecting. His work reflects on the production and circulation of images in the Middle East, while considering notions of power, work, social codes / types, fashion, representation and history.
 
This show focuses on Zaatari's work with photographic documents while building the collection of the Arab Image Foundation. In 1997 Zaatari started a two-year-project traveling, researching, and collecting photographs from families and from photographers while interviewing them with his video camera. Since 1999 has been focusing on the archive of Studio Sherezade, studying, indexing and presenting the work of Hashem al-Madani (1928-), a studio photographer who worked in Sidon from 1948 until this day.
 
On the ground floor he presents five enlarged photographs of bodybuilders taken in the Southern Lebanese port city of Sidon. The images are reproduced from negatives taken by Hashem al Madani in 1948. The negatives have been badly stored and were consequently damaged with time and therefore the images have eroded in contrast with the youth of the bodybuilders depicted in them.
 
On the first floor we present two video installations, On People, Photography and Modern Times (38 minutes, 2010) and Her and Him (2011). The first tells the stories behind photographic records that Zaatari had researched and collected for the Arab Image Foundation in the late nineties. It questions some of the conventions of photographic preservation, and evokes some of the emotions that ties photographs to their owners while commenting on their loneliness aging. It is the first time it has been shown outside the Middle East. Her and Him is comprised of the video Her + Him Van Leo (32 minutes, 2001) made with a long interview Armenian-Egyptian photographer Van Leo, about conventions related to his work. Next to the video hangs a vitrine of photographs taken by Van Leo himself in 1957 showing an Egyptian young woman photographed while undressing in twelve poses.
 
In the exhibition reception space is shown the full series of Another Resolution, 1998, where Zaatari re-stages photographs of children, using adults, therefore commenting on our photographs contribution in constructing gender.
 
Akram Zaatari was born in Sidon, Lebanon in 1966 and lives and works in Beirut. He is author of more than 40 videos and numerous photographic and video installations and publications.
 
Recent exhibitions include MUSAC, Spain, Kunsternes Hus, Norway, the Istanbul Bienniale, and Videobrasil 2011 where his video Tomorrow Everything will be Alright won the Grand Prize. His works have been acquired by Kunsthaus Zürich; TBA, Vienna; Tate Modern, London and Centre Pompidou, Paris amongst others. His exhibition The Uneasy Subject opens at MUAC in Mexico on January 28, 2012.
 
 
GALERIE SFEIR-SEMLER
Admiralitätstr. 71
D - 20459 Hamburg
Germany
T: +49 40 37 51 99 40
 
GALERIE SFEIR-SEMLER
 
Read On... GALERIE SFEIR-SEMLER, Hamburg

 

CRISTINA GUERRA CONTEMPORARY ART, Lisbon

Image courtesy of Cristina Guerra Contemporary Art, Lisbon
 
 
Monkey Business
João Paulo Feliciano
 
20 January to 7 March 2012
 
João Paulo Feliciano's artwork is defined by a relentless experimental approach through which everything that surrounds him can be appropriated and converted into pliable substances. Within his body of work we can list images, objects, paintings, sculptures, sound installations, music, text, lyrics and several other strongly performative actions. All these contribute to outline his practice as an author that chose to refuse the possibility of being classified through the media he uses as well as through a particular style.
 
His filiation as an artist, concerning both visual arts and music, strikes us as unusual by not being the natural result of an academic evolution and education in these areas, but the consequence of a compulsive attention to other authors, their medias and works, resulting in a sharing, self-learning process.
 
We can say that Feliciano is an independent artist as, in a broad sense, he does not restrict himself neither to a fixed artistic genre nor the traditionally evolutive hegemony of a curricular path, aligned with the rules of the art market and the system of relations and protocols it imposes.
 
Under the title Monkey Business, the exhibition reveals a political, ironical stance that brings into question, once more, the position of the artist and the gallery within the universe of contemporary art. João Paulo Feliciano does not yield to the temptation of using a political discourse as expression of an activist or interventional action. On the contrary, he reveals his working processes using the gallery space as an extension of his daily activity as an artist and cultural producer. The exhibition is not built as a system of relations between different pieces but as a discourse that flows between the presentation of recent work and the appropriation of the space by displacing part of the imaginary contents of the artistís studio to the gallery. As if the exhibition was just one more moment in his daily life.
 
Converting and reframing spaces, different media and objects, is a recurring strategy and distinguishing feature in JPF's work. A sculpture composed by two similar deactivated electronic organs disposed back to back, united by a flat mirrored surface dislocates the observerís perception while at the same time the artist bombards the acknowledgement processes we are subjected through the semantic internalization of the workís title, A Pair of Pair.ies.
 
Funky Junk I and Funky Junk II, images printed on canvas, depict a stack of keyboards (still lifes?). These pieces inhabited the artist's working space, stored at random and haphazardly handled, bordering abuse, they were later recovered to reveal a daily routine where the production of the artwork is a momentary process that solely depends on the artist decision.
 
This approach to production process is transferred to the gallery space through the presence of several objects, pertaining to different typologies and cultural references: merchandising (related with his music work), music albums, catalogues and books produced in different moments of his career both as musician and as an artist. The absence of art pieces in the last room of the gallery disrupts the context of the show. There, we can find a heterogeneous collection of objects for sale. It is as if the gallery and the show incorporate a garage sale of personal items, all available for a small price. A flee market that ironically questions the status of the art market and consumers. This intervention, abruptly discontinuing the exhibition, emphasizes the desire of the artist to use strategies and actions unrelated to the hierarchy of the art object as a trade value.
 
Monkey Business can be seen as an index of João Paulo Feliciano's body of work. The exhibition offers clues to his actions, signs of a cumulative, cinetic, multidisciplinary and transgressing artistic process. Returning to the title of one of Feliciano's first pieces, Mind Your Own Business, we can recover this open approach on his work. Dating from the early nineties, this video confronts the viewer with the impossibility of perceiving the rapidly changing images. An ironic moment that stems from the everyday life of an author fuelled by the stimuli that impel him to think about the artistic practice as a way of life.
 
 
CRISTINA GUERRA CONTEMPORARY ART
Rua Santo António à Estrela, 33
1350-291 Lisbon
Portugal
T +351 213 959 559
 
CRISTINA GUERRA
 
Read On... CRISTINA GUERRA Contemporary Art, Lisbon

 

YANCEY RICHARDSON GALLERY, New York

Jitka Hanzlová
Untitled (Tabi), from the series Here, 2008
12 x 8 inches
C-Print
Courtesy of Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York
 
 
JITKA HANZLOVA
HERE
 
January 5 – February 11, 2012
 
The Yancey Richardson Gallery is pleased to present HERE, a project gallery exhibition of works by Czech photographer Jitka Hanzlová, marking the debut exhibition of the artist’s work at the gallery. The decade-long series documents the artist’s experience of acclimation to her new home in the Ruhr region of northwest Germany. Formed by a conglomeration of industrial centers, including Hanzlová’s adopted town of Essen, the landscape of the Ruhr region is in sharp contrast to the pristine forests of her childhood.
 
The residual sense of foreignness to the landscape, language and people is at the heart of the series. As Hanzlová explains, “Otherness is a challenge. It keeps you alert and sharpens your senses.” The images reflect this visual acuity, presenting curious landscapes clearly shaped by human intervention yet resplendent in their poetic sensibility. “The feel of a place is very important to my work, especially the light,” says the artist. Hanzlová’s expert treatment of light and attention to detail lend a sense of the transformative in these landscapes, as seen through the eyes of a poet.
 
Hanzlová has produced several other bodies of work since beginning HERE in 1998, including: Cotton Rose, a series of portraits in Japan, published as a monograph by Steidl; Leonardo, a series of Renaissance inspired portraits; Female, a portrait series of women the artist encountered on the streets of Europe and America; and Forest , a quiet yet powerful exploration of the forest near the Czech village where she grew up. Void of any trace of civilization, the Forest images possess an out-of-time, enchanted quality. As critic John Berger writes in the introduction to Steidl’s monograph of Forest, “the longer one looks at Jitka Hanzlová’s pictures of her forest, the clearer it becomes that escape from the prison of modern time is possible.”
 
Born in Czechoslovakia in 1958, Jitka Hanzlová has lived in Germany since 1983. She has had solo exhibitions in several international museums, including the Deichtorhallen, Hamburg, the Fotomuseum, Winterthur, and the Stedelijk, Amsterdam. She is the winner of the 2007 BMW Prize at Paris Photo, the 2003 Grand Prix Award, Arles, and was shortlisted for the 2001 Citibank Photography Prize. Her work is held in the permanent collections of several major museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Stedelijk Museum, and the Fotomuseum Winterthur, among many others.
 
 
YANCEY RICHARDSON GALLERY
535 West 22nd Street 3rd floor
New York, NY 10011
T: 1 646-230-9610
 
YANCEY RICHARDSON GALLERY
 
Read On... YANCEY RICHARDSON GALLERY, New York
 

ROBERTS & TILTON, Los Angeles

Gusmano Cesaretti
from the East Los Angeles Series, 1974
Black and white silver gelatin print, 24 x 36 inches
Courtesy of Roberts & Tilton, Los Angeles
 
 
GUSMANO CESARETTI
Curated by Aaron Rose
 
January 7 – February 18, 2012
 
Roberts & Tilton is pleased to announce an exhibition presenting new and vintage photographs by Gusmano Cesaretti, curated by Aaron Rose.
 
The main gallery will feature work from the early period of Cesaretti’s career (1970s) in which he immersed himself in the East Los Angeles culture. His photographs of this era celebrated a sub-culture that had rarely been captured before. The exhibition will include twenty-four vintage, unique prints that have recently been discovered and will be shown for the first time in Los Angeles.
 
An Italian immigrant who moved to Los Angeles in the 1970s, Cesaretti quickly became fascinated by East Los Angeles. Inspired by the colors, people and graffiti that populated the East Side, he began to capture the vulnerability and uncensored quality of this area. Always honest when shooting his subjects, Cesaretti presents them as they are: violent, loving, confident, scared, full of life. It is this energy and conflict inherent in those who occupy the edges of society that drives his photographic investigations.
 
In the Project Space at Roberts & Tilton, Cesaretti visits a turbulent section of Colón, Panama. Approached with the same spirit and tenacity reflected in his previous works, these recent intimate photographs of children in an impoverished community offer a fresh perspective into this part of the world. Cesaretti, an outsider himself, became personally connected with the subjects he was shooting. The intimacy existing in the photographs is a result of the relationships that Cesaretti built with his subjects over time. Never forcing a situation, Cesaretti addresses his subjects with great concern and patience, allowing for an essential level of trust to be established. The resulting openness between Cesaretti and his subjects permeates the work, allowing the viewer access to a world that would otherwise be guarded against outsiders.
 
Gusmano Cesaretti was born in 1946 in Lucca, Italy and currently resides in Los Angeles, CA. Cesaretti has published two books: Street Writers – A Guided Tour of Chicano Graffiti, and Physical Graffiti-4x4=24. His photographs have been exhibited at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Recent exhibitions include Art in the Streets, at the Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles, CA), and This Side of Paradise: Body and Landscape in Los Angeles Photographs, at The Huntington Library (San Marino, CA). His photographs are in the permanent collection at the Smithsonian Institute (Washington D.C.) and the Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles, CA).
 
Roberts & Tilton is a Participating Gallery of Pacific Standard Time. This unprecedented collaboration, initiated by the Getty, brings together more than sixty cultural institutions from across Southern California to tell the story of the birth of the L.A. art scene.
 
 
ROBERTS & TILTON
5801 Washington Boulevard
Culver City
Los Angeles, CA 90232
T: 1 323.549.0223
 
ROBERTS & TILTON
 
Read On... ROBERTS & TILTON, Los Angeles
 

CELL PROJECT SPACE, London

Laura Buckley
Fata Morgana, 2012
mixed media
(l.480 x h.290 x w.242 cm)
 
 
LAURA BUCKLEY
FATA MORGANA
 
Private View Thursday 19th January 2012, 6-9pm
20th January - 26th February, 2012
 
Preface by Elizabeth Neilson with further commissioned gallery text available during the exhibition.
 
Cell Project Space is proud to present Fata Morgana a solo project by Irish born, London based artist Laura Buckley. For Fata Morgana, Buckley has initiated an ambitious single screen installation commissioned specifically for the CYcLORAMA series and produced with the assistance of Cell, The Arts Council and The Irish Arts Council.
 
The title Fata Morgana refers to a highly complex superior mirage where inverted and erect images are stacked one on top of another causing an object on the horizon to be distorted beyond recognition. The name also refers to Morgan le Fay, mythical figure from the Arthurian legends at once a villain, seductress, witch, healer or goddess, her unquestionable power is dictated by her ability to shape-shift throughout the myths and legends in which she appears.
 
This personification of a natural phenomenon and anthropomorphic sensibility in humanity gently riffs through Buckley’s work. For the past four years the artist has been producing multifaceted installations incorporating components ranging from motorised plywood structures, Perspex sculptures, sound and projected moving image. Her idiosyncratic use of light both within her installations and films is exacerbated by the sleek surfaces she includes which reflect projections onto the viewer, or are the focus and subject matter of the films themselves.
 
Where previously mechanical movement of objects has made up an important part of her installations, in Fata Morgana both the film and the sculpture are static. This allows the fast paced edit of the film and surface of the sculpture to interact with the body and perception of the entering viewer, including and absorbing them into the kaleidoscopic installation.
 
Originally trained as a painter Buckley now builds upon her experimentation with image making via techniques of scanning. Her recent investigations into the abilities of a flatbed scanner to record objects in motion are entitled Moving Image Series and are included alongside the more overtly sculptural work. By moving readymade and assembled sculptures over the bed of the machine she allows the mobile lens of the scanner to capture their foreshortened surfaces and movement. For Fata Morgana, Buckley has used the most basic form of animation – filming a still image by scrolling it in-front of the cameras lens - in much the same way the objects themselves were moved before the lens of the scanner. Thereby transferring them between sculpture and moving image work to create a physical and visual presence from light rather than paint.
 
Often shooting her digital footage on a mobile phone or handheld camera Buckley’s projected digital films conjure up memories of early modernist experiments in form and motion by László Moholy-Nagy or Marcel Duchamp's Rotoreliefs. Focusing on simple everyday encounters with the world, which when absorbed by the entire installation become elements of a larger composition or abstract narrative. By dissolving the resolution between artwork and the body’s encounter with it Buckley allows the viewer to become entirely subsumed by the abstract image causing a hypnotic or trance-like experience.
 
'Fata Morgana' follows recent solo projects 'The Mean Reds', at Supplement Gallery, London July 2011 and 'Waterlillies' at Mothers Tankstation, Dublin, 2010. Buckley was shortlisted for the first 'Converse/Dazed Emerging Artist Prize' in 2010 and her work has been included in group exhibitions at Stephen Friedman Gallery London, 'Et De Lumiere' (with Jacob Mattner) at 401 Contemporary, Berlin 2010, 'Stage Fright' (with Haroon Mirza and Dave McLean) at Rokeby, London, 2009 and 'Material Presence' at the Zabludowicz Collection, London, 2008. Buckley graduated with an MA from Chelsea College of Art in 2007 and lives and works in East London.
 
Elizabeth Neilson is Director and Chief Curator of 176 Gallery, London and will be in conversation with the artist for CYcLE CLUB, Thursday 9th February 2012.
 
 
CELL PROJECT SPACE
258 Cambridge Heath Road
London E2 9DA
T: + 44 (0) 20 72413600
 
CELL PROJECT SPACE
 
Read On... CELL PROJECT SPACE, London
 

GALERIE PETER KILCHMANN, Zurich

Image courtesy of Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich
 
 
JAVIER TÉLLEZ
Rotations

January 21th to February 25th, 2012
Exhibition opening: January 20th, 6 – 8 pm
 
Galerie Peter Kilchmann is pleased to present Rotations, a solo exhibition by Javier Téllez. Born in Valencia, Venezuela, in 1969, Javier Téllez currently resides in New York and Berlin. For almost two decades now mental illness has been one of the main subjects of Javier Téllez' practice as an artist. Working often in collaboration with psychiatric patients, it is the aim of Javier Téllez to produce films and videos that attempt to challenge the stereotypes associated with mental illness, and – as Michele Faguet stated in one text on Téllez' work – to "engage in an ethical manner with communities of individuals who live outside the models of normative behavior that define the parameters of a ?sane' society but that are constantly shifting in relation to the ideological structures that determine this social order". Therefore, important components of Téllez' projects are the specific social and political histories of the locations where they are developed, as can be seen with the two main pieces exhibited at the gallery.
 
Rotations (Prometheus and Zwitter) (2011), a new film installation produced after a year-long DAAD residency in Berlin, focuses on the history of the psychiatric institution and its relation to historical events of the 20th century in the German context. The main protagonists of Téllez ' new films are two sculptures. One is Prometheus (1937) by Arno Breker, a monumental male figure that represents the mythological hero grasping a torch. The other figure is Weib und Mann oder Adam und Eva, also known as “Zwitter” (1920) by Karl Genzel, a small wooden figure depicting an hermaphrodite that holds a clock in its hand. Rotations (Prometheus and Zwitter) is an installation composed of two 35 mm silent films projections, showing these sculptures rotating at the same speed in different directions. The sculptures' endless rotation is echoed in the installation by the film passing through the projectors in a loop, referring to the cinematic apparatus and its obsolescence as to the theme of repetition and difference in history. The films show the morphological similarities of the sculptures focusing in extreme details that display their materiality, but it is through the very disparity between the figures that meaning is articulated. The confrontation between both sculptures further attests to a shared history that is not revealed in the projected images and goes back to two parallel exhibitions organized in Munich by the National Socialists in 1937 – the infamous exhibition "Entartete Kunst" and its counterpart, the "Grosse Deutsche Kunstausstellung".
 
"Entartete Kunst", was an exhibition that toured trough Germany and Austria after its premiere in 1937 and consisted of modern art works that were chaotically displayed next to labels designed to inflame the public opinion against modern art, while promoting racial and political segregation. Works belonging to the Expressionist, Cubist, Dadaist and Neue Sachlichkeit movements were hung side by side in the exhibition with pieces by psychiatric patients in order to characterize the avant-garde artists as insane. A large number of artworks made by the mentally ill, including Karl Genzel's "Zwitter" were loaned for the exhibit from the Prinzhorn Sammlung, an art collection focusing on works of psychiatric patients and affiliated to the University of Heidelberg. Reproductions of Genzel's work were also juxtaposed with modern artworks in the pamphlet that advertised the “Entartete Kunst” exhibition.
 
At the same time that modern art was denigrated by the "Entartete Kunst" exhibit, the Nazis promoted traditional paintings and sculptures, exalting the values of racial purity, militarism and obedience that characterized the Nazi ideology. Works that illustrated those values were selected to be part of the exhibition at the "Haus der Kunst", exemplifying a ?sane' art imposed as normative, set against the works condemned as ?degenerated' art. Arno Breker’s bronze statue "Prometheus", originally commissioned by Joseph Goebbels for the garden of the Ministery of Propaganda was one of the centerpieces of the “Grosse Deutsche Kunstausstellung”. Breker's sculpture embodied in its heroic pathos the Aryan ideal that Hitler had previously associated with this mythological figure in his book "Mein Kampf".
 
The two German sculptors brought together in Tellez' installation have obvious dissimilar artistic careers. Arno Breker was a protégé of Adolf Hitler and together with Leni Riefensthal and Albert Speer one of the most influential artists in Germany during the Nazi regime, while Karl Genzel was an outsider artist, and a psychiatric patient of the asylum in Eickeborn, diagnosed with schizophrenia. He was further one of the cases that Hans Prinzhorn analyzed in his groundbreaking book "Bildnerei der Geisteskranken (Artistry of the Mentally ill)" published in 1922. Bringing the unequal figures of Arno Breker and Karl Genzel together, Javier Téllez creates a multi-layered work, which not only attests to the instrumentalization of the Prinzhorn collection by the Nazi regime, but also poses questions of inherent complexity on the notions of normalcy and pathology that are still relevant today.
 
Also on view in the exhibition is the film O Rinoceronte de Dürer (Dürer’s Rhinoceros) from 2010 in which Javier Téllez investigates the architectural structure of the panopticon. The film was shot entirely on location at the panopticon of the Miguel Bombarda Hospital in Lisbon, a psychiatric ward designed as a prison for the criminally insane. Built In 1896 and following the original plans of Jeremy Bentham, the panopticon accommodated 300 patients in narrow single cells grouped around a central tower. The prison was used until the year 2000 and has since become a museum. The fragmentary narrative of O Rinoceronte de Dürer (Dürer’s Rhinoceros) was conceived by the patients in a series of workshops conducted by the artist prior to the shooting of the film. The patients imagined themselves as inhabitants of the former insane asylum and acted fictional scenarios inside the cells. This reconstruction of the everyday life of the mental institution is complemented in the film with voice-overs quoting texts concerned with different architectural models related to the overseeing power of the gaze, like Jeremy Bentham's letter concerning the panoptic, Plato's parable of the cave and Kafka's short story The Burrow. This film was commissioned by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon, in 2010.
 
Téllez exhibited at the 11 th Biennale de Lyon "Une terrible beauté est née", curated by Victoria Noorthoorn in 2011. Recent single exhibitions include “Larger than Life” at the Museu Calouste Gulbenkian in Lisbon, Portugal and Marco, Museo de Arte Contemporánea de Vigo, Spain in 2010. The accompanying catalog can be obtained through the gallery. Javier Téllez will participate in TRACK at S.M.A.K. Ghent, curated by Philippe Van Cauteren and Mirjam Varadinis.
 
 
GALERIE PETER KILCHMANN
Zahnradstrasse 21
CH-8005 Zurich
Switzerland
T: +41 44 278 10 10
 
GALERIE PETER KILCHMANN
 
Read On... GALERIE PETER KILCHMANN, Zurich
 

MAI 36 GALERIE, Zurich

Koenraad Dedobbeleer
Resigned Astonishment, 2011
Varnish on enamel and wood, 83 x 83 x 72.5 cm
Courtesy Mai 36 Galerie, Zurich 
 
 
KOENRAAD DEDOBBELEER
SOME MATERIAL CULTURE FOLLOWING A RANDOM METHOD BASED ON ALEATORY RULES
 
Preview: Thursday, 19 January 2012, 6 to 8 p.m.
20 January - 10 March 2012
 
We are proud to announce our next exhibition of recent work by the Belgian artist Koenraad Dedobbeleer (born in 1975, lives and works in Brussels). He is the 2009 recipient of the Mies van der Rohe grant of the city of Krefeld and has curated two exhibitions at Mu.ZEE Ostende with Phillip van den Bossche. His work is currently on view in a group show at Casino Luxembourg.
 
Koenraad Dedobbeleer creates sculptures, objects, and site-related installations, which strike a chord and yet catch us off balance. His works abound in allusion, ironic commentary and art historical reference. The artist reinterprets everyday objects by subjecting them to subtle but effective modifications, for instance, by changing their size, color or material, or transplanting them into a modernist context. He draws attention to their relationship with the Modernism of the 1920s and 1930s and, at the same time, subverts it in interventions that range from near imperceptibility to large, stagelike productions. His objects and shapes appear conspicuous and disconcerting, and at second glance perfectly ordinary. There is clearly method to his approach, which shows an affinity with appropriation: shades of Fischli/Weiss, for instance, echo in the fragile balancing act of two chairs or of one table poised on the legs of another. While the sculptural expression conveyed by these configurations may not even be deliberate, the shape of an upside down soft serve ice cream is undeniably dynamic in its reference to potentially spiraling movement. Such works as Creating Equivalents or Obsolete Instruments of State or Commerce are receptacles of cultural reference, which have been taken out of context and redimensioned for presentation in the gallery. The artist has a penchant for sending up conventional practices of displaying and communicating objects of art and design by emancipating them from their use value and placing them in an unexpected framework, for example when he converts a black garbage bag into a handbag. In addition to presentation, the architectural and historical givens of a venue and the way they relate to the works on display are of crucial concern. These factors give Dedobbeleer the opportunity to focus on appropriation and once again address the question of autonomy in works of art. The artist describes his work as a multifaceted, open-ended experiment in both form and content and as non-scientific inquiry into options. His instruments are methods of deconstruction and manipulation. With these, Koenraad Dedobbeleer engages in playful analyses, generating procedures that lead to the emergence of both familiar and absurd objects and their combinations.
 
(Text: Dominique von Burg)
 
 
MAI 36 GALERIE
Rämistrasse 37
CH-8001 Zurich
Switzerland
T: +41 44 261 68 80
 
MAI 36 GALERIE
 
Read On... MAI 36 GALERIE, Zurich