re-title.com Features

GALERIE STEFAN RÖPKE, Cologne

Rainer Gross
"Fashion in Art I", 1983
acrylic, oil and collage on canvas
74,8 x 106,3 inches / 190 x 270 cm
Courtesy of Galerie Stefan Röpke
 
 
RAINER GROSS
"Frühe Arbeiten ab 1972"
 
Until 7 April 2012
 
Galerie Stefan Röpke is pleased to present an exhibition of early paintings by Rainer Gross, on view February 24 to April 7, 2012.
 
Running concurrently with a career-long retrospective exhibition at the Museum Ludwig, Koblenz, this exhibition of seminal paintings from the 70’s and 80’s, many of which are being shown here for the first time since his previous retrospective at the Kunsthalle Emden in 1989, allows us to revisit an important period in the artist’s career with works that reflect a transition and combination of cultural experiences and influences as he moved his life from Cologne to New York City. The art-historical influences of Gross’ education and background clearly manifest themselves in these works, the distance from it and the explosive energy of the New York art-scene allowed him to present a fresh perspective; one with a good dose of irony and humor. These paintings highlight Gross’ ability to take all the weight of history, question and re-envision it, and firmly plant it into the present.
 
Rainer Gross was born in Cologne, Germany in 1951. He began his art education at the Cologne Werkkunstschule in 1973, but quickly abandoned it to move to New York City. Through the rest of the 70’s, he worked as Howard Kanovitz’s studio assistant and Larry Rivers’, placing him right in the middle of the New York art-scene. Gross was included in his first group-exhibition as part of the “Art Prize of the Young West” at the Museum Bochum in 1973, and shortly after, received his first solo-exhibition at Galerie Witte, Cologne in 1974. He has had numerous gallery and museum solo-exhibitons including at the Musée Cantonal des Beaux Arts (Lusanne, Switzerland) 1984, the Museum Folkwang (Essen, Germany) 1994, the Stadtmuseum, Cologne 1996, the Krannert Museum in Champaign/Urbana 1997, to name a few. Rainer Gross continues to live and work in New York City.
 
The retrospective exhibition at the Museum Ludwig, Koblenz will be on view from March 11 to April 22, 2012. A monograph “Rainer Gross: KONTACT, NY paintings 1972-2012”, is being published by Wienand Werlag for the occasion.
 
 
GALERIE STEFAN RÖPKE
St. Apern-Strasse 17-21
50667 Cologne
Germany
T: +49 022125 55 59
 
GALERIE STEFAN RÖPKE
 
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GALERIE EMMANUEL POST | BERLIN

Tobias Hild
Burgund, 2011
oil on canvas
190 x 240 cm
Courtesy of Galerie Emmanuel Post, Berlin
 
 
TOBIAS HILD
Burgund
 
March 10 - May 5, 2012
 
Tobias Hild draws and paints. His works incorporate landscapes, animals, human beings, cartoon-style monsters, robotsand machines. His pictures evoke narrative associations which – if pursued further – generate bizarre worlds. Knights’ castles, (dark) forests, burning houses, hybrid creatures, flying objects, desolate landscapes and mountain ranges are reminiscentof fairy tales and fables, but also of the fictitious worlds of Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, J. G. Ballard or Haruki Murakami. If, however, you pursue these literary worlds, you move away from the pictorial worlds created by Tobias Hild, because the relationship is only one of approximation; Hild’s works tell their own stories, which have a specifically fantastical narrative flow.
 
The starting point for Tobias Hild’s pictures is his ordinary surroundings and everyday life. He records his subtle observationsof daily life with both brush and pen. The artist always has a sketch book in his pocket and collects his impressions everywhere– whether travelling or in his day-to-day life at home – with an alert and attentive eye. Using a pencil or crayon he capturesmoods, emotions and scenes. Reality – what is that? Tobias Hild approaches this age-old question of philosophy and art with a brisk pen and brush. (...)
 
Hild’s pictures are enigmatic, ambivalent, sometimes sinister, but they are also humorous. They are his commentaries on everydaydisasters, tribulations, fears and nightmares, but also on poetic, pleasant moments. The disconcerting power of his images lies notonly in his stories, his combination of narrative components, but also in his painting style, his expressive gestures and his obviouspassion for creating effects, structures and forms through colour. Tobias Hild’s sensuous enjoyment of colour is dominant.The painter’s pleasure in the craft of painting, in the material of the paints and in the different hues is self-evident.
 
Dr. Jeannette Stoschek, 2012
 
A new catalogue edited by the Ostdeutsche Sparkassenstiftung is now available.
 
 
GALERIE EMMANUEL POST | BERLIN
Grolmanstr. 46
10623 Berlin-Charlottenburg
Berlin
Germany
T: +49 30.21460830
 
GALERIE EMMANUEL POST | BERLIN
 
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AMBACHER CONTEMPORARY, Munich

Ernesto Canovas
"Peyoteland", 2011
Mixed media and resin on board
70 x 100 cm
Courtesy of Ambacher Contemporary, Munich
 
 
LONDON CALLING VOL I.
ERNESTO CANOVAS
"An other day at the office"
 
March 16 - May 5, 2012
 
Concern in the Eurozone - panic on the streets ! America's social infrastructure collapses as Republicans posture about outdated morality ! Economic chaos, Crisis in the Middle East...
it's just Another Day at the Office (for the human race) !
 
On the surface Ernesto Canovas' works are smooth, and sometimes we can see our own reflection. Characterised by their physical depth and layering, Canovas' work encourages the viewer to study what lies behind these surfaces at images which become so obscured as to almost, but not quite, vanish. Bright flashes of colour seduce the eye into an examination of the darker imagery that lies beneath. Regardless of any mystery and ambiguity however, the sheer delight in the gestural use of paint is an inherent quality that remains constant.
 
The vocabulary of Pop Art combines with old and new media source materials to produce work which perfectly captures the zeitgeist of our times.
 
Ernesto Canovas' works are based on pop cultural images from recent history and contemporary life. The departure point for his artistic process is a visual harvest: Canovas gathers images from vintage photographs and electronic media, and applies these onto wood. He relies on the pattern of fibres in the wood, working with the grain to discover and suggest rhythms and echoes. Canovas' paintings feature bright, abstract shapes that reinforce this sensation of dynamic movement. His multi-layered approach lends perceptual depth and emotional moodiness to the artist's oeuvre.
 
Ernesto Canovas received a BA in Drawing and Painting at Edinburgh College of Art and a MFA on Painting at Slade School of Art, London. He has shown his works in the UK, Berlin, Amsterdam and the USA. He recently exhibited at the Saatchi New Sensations 2011 and has been selected for The Open West Award 2012.
 
 
AMBACHER CONTEMPORARY
Lothstraße 78a
80799 Munich
Germany
T: +49 (0) 89 - 32 55 72
 
AMBACHER CONTEMPORARY
 
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SUSANNE VIELMETTER LOS ANGELES PROJECTS

Dasha Shishkin
"Untitled", 2012
Acrylic and Crayon on Mylar
30" x 42"
Courtesy of Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects

Photo credit Christopher Burke
 
 
DASHA SHISHKIN
"S INT N HO"
 
April 7 - May 12, 2012
Reception: Saturday, April 7, 6 - 8 pm
 
Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new works by Dasha Shishkin in gallery 1 and 2. The exhibition features clusters of new colorful drawings on mylar, some of which consist of multiple pages grouped together.
 
Shishkin's cast of bucolic and mostly female characters are shown in various everyday activities. They are usually situated in crowded places where they go about countless tasks, sometimes determined, sometimes floating about and amongst each other rather dreamlike, yet always committed to some sort of purpose. They go about living, being born, consuming, exciting and dying, and we meet them in the myriad facets and circumstances that happen between birth and death.
 
Dasha Shiskin graduated from Columbia University with an MFA in 2006. Recent solo exhibitions include "I Surrender, Dear", Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, OH; "Desaparecido", Zach Feuer Gallery, New York, NY; and "Dap", Giò Marconi, Milan, Italy. Shiskin's work has been featured in recent group exhibitions at ph-projects, Berlin; The Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College, Purchase, NY; Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Siegen, Germany; and the Denver Art Museum. Her work is also included in several public collections including The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; The Art Institute of Chicago, IL; and the Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg, Germany. 
 
 
SUSANNE VIELMETTER LOS ANGELES PROJECTS
6006 Washington Boulevard
Culver City
Los Angeles
CA 90232
T: +1 310.837-2117
 
SUSANNE VIELMETTER LOS ANGELES PROJECTS
 
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GALERÍA PILAR SERRA, Madrid

Concha García
S/T, 2012
Escultura, modera y ceramica
medidas variables
Courtesy of Galeria Pilar Serra, Madrid
 
 
CONCHA GARCÍA
La mirada asombrada
 
20 March to 28 April
 
La mirada asombrada (The astonished glance), the latest exhibition from Concha García in the Pilar Serra gallery, uses the manipulation of daily objects in order to return to concepts that have been a constant in her artistic work: the private, time and the everyday are intermingled in a frozen and apparently static present, which, in every detail, throbs with major questions regarding the vulnerability of the physical and its manifestation.
 
The sample, made up of various sculptural installations of furniture and ceramics, different works on paper, a book of poems by the Japanese writer Kuan Tao-Sheng and a video, proposes a reflection surrounding the transformation of matter and its consequences: from the concealment of its effects up to its exaltation, passing through the concerns which can result from the fragility of the physical or the harm that can be caused following the exposure of what was masked. And we the spectators, in a way that is almost clandestine, witness the result of a metamorphosis, we do not know when it has taken place nor if it will continue, but of which we are and feel to be a central part.
 
Whether regarded individually or as a whole, each of the pieces of the exhibition acquires on inspection its own voice, almost human, a reflection and metaphor of the relations that are set up between the being with itself, and between the being and its most private, most protective, environment. It is not by chance that, as in this case, the recurrent protagonists in the sculpture of Concha García are furniture and ceramics, objects with very specific functions within the daily flow, which symbolize moments, aspects of our most intimate world, and which, when stripped of their prime essence: the function, enter into crisis, promoting uncertainty, which “seems to be the word that best defines the state of the individual”, as the artist comments.
 
So, armchairs, seats and pots are transformed into one or another form by her hands, coming to acquire a certain humanity in their positions of relation with the space surrounding them. The artist breathes a “puff” on them which provides them with the subtlety of life, characterized by temporality, by the time which, as with all beings that are born, little by little brings them closer to death. And it is in this particular moment that the work of Concha García takes on the characteristic most inherent to her, that of showing the beauty of the imperfect, of the transformable, of – in the end – matter. The physical, with nothing hidden, becomes the protagonist and symbolically, from the appearance of the object trouvé, provides evidence of the traces of existence. Because as she notes, “objects, like people, are borne, they live and die [...] We are frightened by the unexpected reflection of a shadow on the clean, smooth and immaculate surface which they once had, which we once had. The objects that are presented here reveal to us the beauty of the transformation compared to restoration, of the expired compared to the perennial [...] Recovering La mirada asombrada in which time is not an enemy to be defeated but rather the place where dreams reside”. In this exhibition, Concha García proposes a song to the beauty of what is alive and is unrepeatable, showing its scars and absences which, far from being covered, are exposed to the light in all their splendour.
 
As well as nationally, the work of Concha García (Santander, 1960) has also been exhibited internationally in countries such as Japan, Germany, Italy, France and Poland. It can also be found in museums and collections such as the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, La Caixa Foundation, Santander Art Museum, the collections of the Caja de Burgos, the Patio Herreriano Museum in Valladolid or the Artium Museum in Vitoria. Her artistic career has led to her receiving numerous awards, notable among which are the Pablo Picasso First Prize for engraving and drawing of the Spanish Ministry of Culture, First Prize in the Julio Prieto Nespereira International Biennial for Engraving, Madrid First Prize for Engraving, Second Prize for Sculpture in the VI Competition of the Professional Football Foundation or Gregorio Prieto First Prize for Drawing; and the winning of prestigious grants such as from the Marcelino Botín Foundation or that of the Ministry of Culture in the Colegio de España in Paris.
 
 
GALERÍA PILAR SERRA
Almagro, 44
28010 Madrid
Spain
T: +34 91 308 15 69 /70
 
GALERÍA PILAR SERRA
 
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TANYA BONAKDAR GALLERY, New York

Charles Long
Untitled, 2012
steel, fabric, ecopoxy, and pigment
88 x 30 x 32 inches; 223.5 x 76.2 x 81.3 cm
Courtesy OF Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York
 
 
CHARLES LONG
Minimal Surfaces_Ocean of Hours
 
Until 7 Apr 2012
 
Tanya Bonakdar Gallery is pleased to present the ninth solo exhibition of new sculpture by Charles Long. In this inventive body of work, Long shares with the viewer his search for rich experiences that are unique to abstract sculpture. Through the exploration of new processes and materials, Long endeavors to arrive at spatially and visually engaging works that aim to offer the viewer an open experience by eschewing external reference. These lively and poetic forms continue the formal language Long has been building for decades.
 
The origin of any one of Long's sculptures might be traced back to some aimless doodle within the evolutionary soup of sketches that pile up in the studio. As the artist alternates from pencil and paper to torch and steel rods, these fledgling apparitions prompt the growth of a three-dimensional steel skeleton. Long then considers the many potential surfaces that could evolve within the artwork's unique scaffolding. Using a resin made from soy and peanuts, he then materializes a form from the numerous potential surfaces that wait unseen within the various perimeters of the steel framework.
 
The resulting curving forms follow a mathematical principle known as "minimal surfaces," according to which a given plane assumes a geometrical configuration of least possible area into which it can readily deform according to a given framework. The use of soy-peanut epoxy to freeze these flowing forms is an important new step in the artist's practice, as this natural material allows Long to return to his biomorphic forms. In some, the raw translucent resin is stained with colors that flow across the organic form, creating atmospheric drips and haze. In others, color and textures shift across the opaque resin surfaces, defining the volumes enclosed by these minimal surfaces.
 
Long finds inspiration in the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and thus seeks a creative investigation that is open-ended, independent of pre-determined objectives, and, as Emerson himself describes it, a "voyage in the unharbored deep." In one piece, Long has included sketches culled from the rich collection of drawings in which he typically immerses himself while in the studio. Presented within the cavity of the sculpture, Long suggests that the three-dimensional forms on view convey but a few of the many possible manifestations along a continuous arc of the artist's inner exploration.
 
Charles Long's work was recently exhibited at the UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles as part of a solo presentation entitled Seeing Green, in conjunction with the exhibition All of This and Nothing: 6th Hammer Invitational. Other recent shows include The Uncertainty of Objects and Ideas: Contemporary Sculpture, at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC (group 2006); 100 Pounds of Clay, Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA (solo 2006); Gone Formalism, Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, (group 2006); and More Like a Dream Than a Scheme, David Winton Bell Gallery, Brown University, Providence, RI, traveled to SITE Santa Fe (solo 2005). In addition to being featured in the Whitney Biennial, Long has received the American Academy of Arts and Letters "Award of Merit Medal for Sculpture."
 
 
TANYA BONAKDAR GALLERY
521 West 21st Street
New York, NY 10011
T: +1 212 414 4144
 
TANYA BONAKDAR GALLERY
 
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MADDER139, London

Linda Aloysius
Bird, 2011
Mixed Media
Courtesy of Madder 139, London
 
 
LINDA ALOYSIUS
NEW MODEL ARMY
 
15 March to 28 April 2012
 
MADDER139 is delighted to announce the first solo exhibition of works by newly represented Scottish artist Linda Aloysius.
 
Aloysius’ semi-figurative works often wear tattered old garments that gesture towards notions of feminine identity – the eternal bride, the old bird, the painted lady. We might quickly surmise that they are a riposte to the cock-sure monumentalism of sculptures hewn and erected by men: all those giant embodiments of machismo that populate our plazas and museums are rendered absurd, faltering, unbalanced. Their subversive intelligence chips away at a more recent layer of art history too: they stand in contrapuntal relationship to the virile residues of (mostly male) postminimal artists from the 1970s onwards. In the works before you, the scattering and binding of materials speaks not of testosterone-fuelled action (as it often did to an earlier generation), but of a compulsion to use extant objects as queues for new forms. It is action born of responsibility, desire and attentiveness.
 
Doubt is a generative force, and it unravels these objects quickly. They look like figures, but are they not also in many ways abstract? Are those scrubby dabs of paint part of the found objects or later additions? What is the significance of Aloysius’ observations and engagements with the built environment and its detritus? Is that rip, that rupture, not somewhat obscene? Named after terms for women in boorish everyday language – Bird, Bag, Angel – they live up to their names by donning garbs of grubby silk voile, concrete ballet shoes and broken tiaras. If monumentalism and masculine sculpture is inverted here, so too are these wearisome clichés of femininity. Such a concatenation pre-empts deeply embedded ways of looking: the anthropomorphic eye that makes abstract forms human, and the priapic eye that objectifies life.
 
Jean-François Lyotard once remarked that, “What cannot be tamed is art as silence.” In their quest to wriggle free from easy definitions, Aloysius’ works suggest themselves to us as unmediated materials. They engage with the concreteness of language, stripping it of its symbolism to locate what might be called its pre-linguistic modus operandi. To pin them down, I would need to resort to endless clauses: ‘but’, ‘although’, ‘nevertheless’. And so, I find myself writing a text not so much about objects as the ghost of language. These sculptures locate an anxiety between words and objects, a skirmish that neither can win. How shall we proceed? What I can say, finally, is: be alert to the objects here, for there is more in them than this text can contain.
 
Linda Aloysius is in her final year of a practice led PhD at Goldsmiths College. Her work was selected by Phyllida Barlow for the Creekside Open at APT Gallery, London last year; She also showed in 2011 alongside Matt Calderwood, Angela de la Cruz, Alexis Harding, Ana Prada, Paul Harrison and John Wood. Other recent exhibitions include at Sir John Soane’s Museum, London and the Centre for Contemporary Culture, Barcelona.
 
 
MADDER139
137 Whitecross Street
and Playhouse Yard
London EC1Y 8JL
T: +44 (0)20 7490 3667
E: info @ madder139.com
 
MADDER139
 
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STUX GALLERY, New York

Kathy Ruttenberg
The Messenger 2010
ceramic
15.25 x 23 x 38 inches 39 x 58 x 97 cm
Courtesy of Stux Gallery, New York
 
 
KATHY RUTTENBERG
The Earth Exhales: Ceramic Sculptures
 
March 22 – May 5, 2012
Opening Reception: Thursday, 22nd March, 6-8PM
 
“Dogman loved Ms. Rabbit Lady so much he wanted to run deep into the woods with her so he could eat her in privacy.”
- Kathy Ruttenberg
 
Working with only “earth, fire and emotions,” Kathy Ruttenberg's fairytale-like ceramic sculptures create a world that is immediately captivating, but the viewer might be surprised by what’s down the rabbit hole.
 
Her first show at Stux Gallery, "The Earth Exhales", intersects in sensibility with works by artists such as Adriana Varejão, Arlene Shechet, and Kiki Smith, and may recall the theatricality of Mike Kelley, Louise Bourgeois and Mauricio Cattelan. Her violent and devastating visions are disturbingly peaceful, idyllic and sustainable. Treading the boundary of the metaphorical and the literal, Ruttenberg’s world is filled with lush foliage, woodland creatures and puzzling, slightly grim yet open-ended ruminations of gender relations. Men are always portrayed as animals in gentlemen's clothing, and women are always well-groomed and dressed in rounded skirts. On one hand, men are literally animal-like savages, but at the same time they are native creatures of the woodlands and the earth itself, whereas the female figures are the outsiders, if not intruders. Its hard to tell if they are men masquerading as animals, or vice versa. Death, in works such as “The Moment After”, is the stark aftermath of failed love, but also an opportunity to blossom imaginatively and become one with earth.
 
In “Submission”, a man with a deer’s head holds a woman in a Pieta fashion, but religious weight or any other references to non-romantic aspects of reality dissipate in Ruttenberg's wonderland. Their love story retreat behind their dead-pan, nonchalant expressions, and is instead narrated in a completely carnal and materialized manner:on the man’s back, two windows are carved out to display a mouse and a dog, and an image of a dog man eating her alive is tattooed on his skin. The occurrence of love is commemorated, and her demise and sacrifice are casually noted. “Ladies Chaste”, a light sculpture, further complicates this discussion. The piece is composed of women alone, but the freedom from the dogman-ruled earth does not translate into relief. Literally suspended from the earth in a bright chandelier, the ladies are dressed in angelic, beribboned white dresses. The flowers that consumed their bodies in “The Moment After” are now uprooted and purely decorative. However, the women are identical, lifeless and stifled, dangling with detached joints like rack of unused puppets. Instead of imagined vegetation, they are consumed and saturated by real, artificial lighting, and have been reduced to a set of commercial light fixtures in exchange for gaining chastity. The burning bulbs echo the firing clay, and this time the agitating heat is tangible as the light casts on the viewer.
- Lucy Li
 
Kathy Ruttenberg is a New York based, Chicago born sculptor. She received her BFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York, pursuing advance studies in Morocco and at New York University. She has been exhibited widely in the U.S. and internationally in places such as Korea, Spain and France. Ruttenberg’s work has received wide coverage in publications such as The New York Times, Art in America, The Independent and The Boston Globe.
 
 
STUX GALLERY
530 West 25th Street
New York, NY 10001
T: +1 212 352-1600
 
STUX GALLERY
 
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T293, Rome

Claire Fontaine
Untitled (The Invisible Hand), 2011
wood, plastic, brass, nylon threads, metal, electro magnets, battery and plinth
18.5 x 23 x 16.5 cm
Courtesy of T293, Naples | Rome
 
 
CLAIRE FONTAINE
‘Ma l’amor mio non muore’
 
March 17 - May 12 2012
 
For the title of her first solo exhibition in Rome at T293, Claire Fontaine takes inspiration from the book written by various authors that was first published in 1971 by Arcana and couldn’t be confiscated by the police only because all the copies were sold out when the action was launched. Later republished by Castelvecchi, and by Derive Approdi today, the book includes recipes for subversive actions as well as for the re-appropriation of one’s body and health. Written by several hands in the climate of an avant-garde already declining, the multi-coloured text brushes the adventure of drugs and the active resistance against the attacks of the police, when the movement could still face them.
 
Ma l’amor mio non muore (But my love never dies) is in this exhibition also the title and the text of a neon sign that expresses hope and faith in a future of freedom, in a discouraging moment, when resisting has become hard and dangerous. In 2006, Claire Fontaine wrote that “a love that does not die has its reasons more often rooted in the past than in the present. Certainly this is because love has less a sense of reality than it has a sense of the possible and it is closely related with the future and the un-happened. That we love communism – and that we love it still – means for us that the future exists and is not the private property of today’s or tomorrow’s dominants. This means that the love that allows the passing of time, that makes projects and memories possible, is not possessive, jealous, indivisible, but collective; it means that this love doesn’t fear neither hate nor rage, it does not hide unarmed at home, but runs the streets and opens all closed doors.”
 
The video Situations (2011) that paraphrases a dvd on street fighting, is a series of reproductions of gestures inviting the spectator to reproduce them once again. Placed within a brechtian device, the actors interrupt themselves constantly in order to address directly the public to explain that the movements that they are showing us are a simulation. At the same time, through this explicitly pedagogic procedure, they make their gestures quotable by anyone, as much by potential friends as by enemies, they redistribute indiscriminately a useful and dangerous knowledge. The actors have been filmed in a white cube, a context abstracted from space and time: these images in fact tell the story of bodies that resist and attack, that could be living at any historical time, and transforming banal objects into weapons and their actions into a lethal self-defence system.
 
Untitled (The invisible hand) (2011) is a modified un ready-made made from a Newton’s cradle – which is a common ‘executive toy’ – customized by Lehman Brothers. The oscillating balls are now prisoners of a magnetic field that keeps them in a state of perpetual motion on top of a plastic tennis court where is ironically inscribed the word “Networking”. The sculpture is at the same time a sarcastic comment on the failure of the company – that has become emblematic of the crisis which we are still experiencing – and it is a metaphor of Adam Smith’s theory according to which an invisible hand regulates the free market. This ghost movement, that can now reproduce itself without human intervention, is a disquieting message that reaches us from an economic moment that has now past but that is still secretly alive and active under the skin of our present
 
The exhibition will be held simultaneously with the exhibition at Fondazione Pastificio Cerere in Rome, 16 March – 16 May 2012 (opening March 16).
 
 
T293
Via dei Leutari 32
00186 Rome
Italy
T: +39 06 83763242
 
T293
 
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BRANCOLINI GRIMALDI, London

© Dan Holdsworth
Mount Shasta D-2, 2012
Courtesy of Brancolini Grimaldi, London
 
 
DAN HOLDSWORTH
Transmission: New Remote Earth Views
 
23 March – 19 May 2012
 
Brancolini Grimaldi announces a new exhibition of work by Dan Holdsworth curated by Sebastien Montabonel.
 
In Transmission: New Remote Earth Views, Holdsworth appropriates topographical data to document the ideologically and politically loaded spaces of the American West in an entirely new way. In his images of the Grand Canyon, Yosemite, Mount Shasta, Mount St. Helens and Salt Lake City (Park City), we see stark, uninterrupted terrains where meaning is made through what it is absent, as much as what is seen. What at first appears to be a pure white snow-capped mountain is in fact a digitally rendered laser scan of the earth interpreted from United States Geological Survey data, a ‘terrain model' used to measure climate and land change - to measure man's effect on the earth.
 
Belying his empirical methodology is the fact that each of these terrains has a rich and conflicting cultural legacy. Beginning with the idealised aesthetic of the Romantic sublime via the deadpan industrial frames of the New Topographics photographers a century later, each has been subject to the gaze of artistic, political, and sociological categories claiming this territory as their own. Extending ideas of the frontier and seeing anew, Transmission captures the world as if from space, functioning not only as a map of the land but as a mapping of the discourses that these lands have come to represent.
Working outside of the wilderness myths that render the images from the photographic avant-garde the ‘after' to nineteenth-century visions of Carlton Watkins' ‘before', Holdsworth opens up a working territory that is open to the ambiguous and ethereal, oscillating between realms of art and science, the familiar and the alien, the industrial and the natural. Without the signifiers of the natural there is no idealised wilderness or picturesque aesthetic, no invoking of the Romantic version of the sublime; and yet at the same time what is antithetical to these visual tropes - the man-made, the artificial, the vernacular of the New Topographics photographers - is also absent. With neither the schema of the romantic nor the everyday to guide us, Holdsworth absorbs us into a vision of the unknown; a space that is unequivocally, transcendentally, Other.
 
Holdsworth was born in 1974 in Welwyn Garden City, England. He studied photography at the London College of Printing, and has exhibited internationally including solo shows at BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, and Barbican Art Gallery, London; and group shows at Tate Britain, London, and Centre Pompidou, Paris. His work is held in collections including the Tate Collection, Saatchi Collection and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. A new book of Holdsworth's work titled Blackout will be published by BG Steidl in March.
 
Dan Holdsworth would like to thank and acknowledge the following people, organizations, references and resources: Dr. Stuart Dunning: Dr. of Geomorphology at Northumbria University, England. The US Geological Survey: Gesch, D.B., 2007, The National Elevation Dataset, in Maune, D., ed., Digital Elevation Model Technologies and Applications: The DEM Users Manual, 2nd Edition: Bethesda, Maryland, American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, p. 99-118. Gesch, D., Oimoen, M., Greenlee, S., Nelson, C., Steuck, M., and Tyler, D., 2002, The National Elevation Dataset: Photogrammetric Engineering and Remote Sensing, v. 68, no. 1, p. 5-11.Yosmemite National Park, CA: Rockfall Studies: LiDAR data acquisition and processing completed by the National Center for Airborne Laser Mapping (NCALM - www.ncalm.org). NCALM funding provided by NSF's Division of Earth Sciences, Instrumentation and Facilities Program. EAR-1043051.
 
 
BRANCOLINI GRIMALDI
43 - 44 Albemarle Street
London W1S 4JJ
T: +44 (0)20 7493 5721
 
BRANCOLINI GRIMALDI
 
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