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Galerie Eva Presenhuber: URS FISCHER - BLURRY RENOIR DEBUSSY | KAREN KILIMNIK - 25 Oct 2008 to 31 Jan 2009 Current Exhibition |
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URS FISCHER - BLURRY RENOIR DEBUSSY
Installation Views at Galerie Eva Presenhuber 2008 |
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URS FISCHER | BLURRY RENOIR DEBUSSY | OCTOBER 25 2008 - JANUARY 31 2009 | Opening: Friday, October 24, 6 - 8 pm Galerie Eva Presenhuber is proud to present new works by Urs Fischer. The Swiss artist, whom Eva Presenhuber has accompanied since his very first exhibitions, hardly needs an introduction in Zurich. Wherever Urs Fischer may realize his ideas, he exceeds our expectations and astounds us with his handling of site and materials. One of the high points of the past two years was certainly the show with Ugo Rondinone in the San Stae Church within the framework of the last Venice Biennale. The exhibition that Urs Fischer realized at Gavin Brown's enterprise in New York also needs to be mentioned as the deep hole that the artist had dug in the gallery floor was the ultimate event for many critics in 2007: a white cube was thus turned ambivalently into an excavation pit. The group exhibition WHO'S AFRAID OF JASPER JOHNS at the Tony Shafrazi Gallery, conceived by Urs Fischer and Gavin Brown earlier this year, must have likewise written New York history. The tangle of wallpaper and genuine artworks was as stunning and refreshing as we have learned to expect from Urs Fischer. The fact that the show took place in the rooms of a gallerist who - pacifistically motivated during the Viet Nam war - had carried out an attack on Picasso's Guernica gave the event an additional subversive undertone. For his upcoming exhibition in Zurich, Urs Fischer is working on a group of large sculptures (aluminium, 3 to 4 metres high). They conclude a two-year work period that could subsumed under the concept of fundamental creative research: Fischer kneaded simple amorphous forms out of clay, a selection of which he cast in an enlarged format. Traces such as hand lines are partly still visible on the metal surface and tell of a formative process that could hardly be more fundamental, or more arbitrary. The monumental sculptural volumes lie on the boundary between abstraction and figuration, somewhere in the no-man's-land between the specific and the general, between a concrete individual form and a superordinate category. When asked about his newest work group, the artist cites terms such as archetype and brute force. Urs Fischer is in search of the new and probes the roots of his own creativity. The research that Urs Fischer pursues is concerned with questions of control and brings chance into play. This was already significant in the dust paintings that he showed in Venice. An interest in artistic and material phenomena is in fact a recurring factor, a constant in the artist's work process. We may think of early installations in which Urs Fischer catapulted the usual vanitas symbolism of decaying fruit into concretely existent reality. Also essential are the countless works where questions of equilibrium play a role. These basic, very materially designed aspects are just as definitive for Fischer's work process as his interest in starkly narrative motifs and his penchant for the grotesque. In his newest sculpture project, meanwhile, a delight in the subversive (a further indispensable feature in Fischer's work) has been kindled: When Urs Fischer does basic research, it is not minimalist vacancy that moves to the foreground of his experimental sculptural creations, but the opposite, namely repletion which materializes in his work even when significance is not intended. For further information, please contact Gregor Staiger at Galerie Eva Presenhuber. In parallel with this exhibition, Galerie Eva Presenhuber will present a show by Karen Kilimnik. Opening hours: Tuesday - Friday 12 noon - 6 pm Saturday 11 am - 5 pm Upcoming exhibitions at the gallery: Douglas Gordon, January 17 - March 2009 Opening: Friday, January 16, 6 - 8 pm KAREN KILIMNIK | OCTOBER 25 2008 - JANUARY 31 2009 Galerie Eva Presenhuber is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Karen Kilimnik, featuring recent works. The American artist, who has been represented by Eva Presenhuber since 1995, became known in the early nineties. Following major overview exhibitions at the ICA, Philadelphia (2006), the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago (2008), the ARC in Paris (2006), and the Serpentine Gallery in London (2007), she is currently preparing a promising show for Zurich, the core of which will be an installation-based presentation of a ballet titled "Sleeping Beauty + Friends", which she has helped choreograph, and which premiered at the New Players Theatre in London in 2007. Also on view will be new oil paintings, drawings, and objects, carefully arranged in a spatial situation that the artist will be creating specially for this Zurich show. This setting, which can be entered through a classicist-like doorway, will be complemented by a large series of photographic works. With her obsessive oeuvre, Karen Kilimnik has been evoking a world saturated by seemingly trivial desires and longings since her early years. The glamor of fashion serves just as much as a means of projection as do TV series, the rainbow press, or the world of ballet: hovering students, dying swans, or dead squirrels are suitable protagonists for her art, which is filled with girls' dreams. In her drawings, Karen Kilimnik combines beauties traced from magazines with lifted quotations, and her own, sometimes quite caustic comments. Her oil paintings, by contrast, appear rather traditional, except that they tell of a sense of tradition that the artist does not derive from her reflection on the art of the past, but from the popularized repertoire of the media industry. While producing her paintings, Karen Kilimnik appropriates seemingly romantic landscapes, castles, and pedigree dogs. No less memorable are her sensitive photographs, which show sceneries from Central Park, landscapes, or shop windows. What makes them sensational is the fact that they spot the media fantasies that characterize Karen Kilimnik's motifs outside the realm of fiction, within a, as it seems, authentic reality. The American artist has left her mark on art history both with her way of taking pictures and her succinct, obsessive installations: She uses striking props and open-mindedly assembles finds, cheap decoration material, and luxury furnishings to form powerful images. The straightforwardness that Karen Kilimnik truly celebrates constitutes, up to this very day, the breaking of a taboo. Her work is, in terms of formalness and content, a balancing act. The insistence with which she has been pursuing her own path for years, however, is the most compelling argument for acknowledging her approach as being far more profound than one was tempted to believe at the beginning of her career. While her early work was interpreted as a both disrespectful and trendsetting flirt with the morbidity of the zeitgeist, it is the exact opposite that has come to the fore more recently: the utterly non-ironical seriousness with which Karen Kilimnik holds on to her themes. Karen Kilimnik 25. Oktober bis 20. Dezember 2008 Vernissage: Freitag, 24. Oktober, 18 - 20 Uhr Galerie Eva Presenhuber freut sich, eine Einzelausstellung mit neuen Werken von Karen Kilimnik zu pr�sentieren. Bekannt geworden ist die Amerikanerin, die bereits seit 1995 von Eva Presenhuber vertreten wird, Anfang der neunziger Jahre. Nach grossen �bersichtsausstellungen im ICA, Philadelphia (2006), im Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago (2008), im ARC in Paris (2006) und in der Serpentine Gallery in London (2007) hat sie f�r ihre Z�rcher Galerie eine viel versprechende Schau in Vorbereitung. Deren Herzst�ck ist die installative Inszenierung eines von ihr selbst mitchoreographierten Balletts �Sleeping Beauty + Friends�, das 2007 im New Players Theatre in London Premiere hatte. In einer sorgf�ltig und eigens f�r Z�rich gestalteten Raumsituation werden neue �lbilder, Zeichnungen und Objekte zu sehen sein. Erg�nzt wird das installative Setting, das durch einen klassizistisch anmutenden T�rrahmen betreten werden kann, von einer ganzen Reihe von fotografischen Arbeiten. Mit ihrem obsessiven Werk beschw�rt Karen Kilimnik seit ihren k�nstlerischen Anf�ngen eine von scheinbar trivialen W�nschen und Sehns�chten ges�ttigte Welt. Der Glanz der Mode dient ihr ebenso als Projektionsfl�che wie TV�Serien, die Herzblattpresse oder die Welt des Balletts: Schwebende Elevinnen, sterbende Schw�ne oder tote Eichh�rnchen sind die passenden Protagonisten ihrer von Jungm�dchentr�umen durchwirkten Kunst. In den Zeichnungen kombiniert Karen Kilimnik aus Magazinen nachgepauste Sch�nheiten mit abgekupferten Zitaten und eigenen, teilweise recht bissigen Kommentaren. Demgegen�ber nehmen sich die �lbilder recht traditionell aus. Nur, dass sie von einem Traditionsbewusstsein erz�hlen, das die K�nstlerin nicht in der Auseinandersetzung mit der Kunst der Vergangenheit entwickelt, sondern aus dem popularisierten Repertoire der Medienindustrie �bernimmt. Malend eignet sich Karen Kilimnik romantisch anmutende Landschaften, Schl�sser, Pferde und Rassenhunde an. Nicht minder denkw�rdig sind die feinf�hlig aufgenommenen Fotografien. Sie zeigen Szenerien aus dem Central Park, Landschaften oder Schaufensterauslagen und sind deshalb so sensationell, weil sie Karen Kilimniks von medialen Fantasien gepr�gten Motive ausserhalb der Fiktion in einer authentisch anmutenden Wirklichkeit orten. Mit ihrer Art zu fotografieren hat die Amerikanerin ebenso Kunstgeschichte geschrieben wie mit ihren so lapidaren wie obsessiven Installationen: Sie hantiert mit effektvollen Requisiten und f�gt unvoreingenommen Fundst�cke, billiges Dekorationsmaterial und edles Mobiliar zu eindrucksvollen Bildern. Die Distanzlosigkeit, die Karen Kilimnik regelrecht zelebriert, stellt bis heute einen Tabubruch dar. Ihr Werk ist eine formale und inhaltliche Gratwanderung. Die Insistenz, mit der die K�nstlerin seit Jahren ihren Weg verfolgt, ist indes das schlagendste Argument f�r einen Ansatz, der weitaus tiefg�ndiger ist, als man in den ersten Jahren versucht war anzunehmen. Interpretierte man ihr Werk am Anfang als einen gleichermassen respektlosen wie trendsetterischen Flirt mit der Morbidit�t des Zeitgeists, tritt heute das exakte Gegenteil in den Vordergrund: die ganz und gar unironische Ernsthaftigkeit, mit der Karen Kilimnik an ihren Motiven festh�lt. F�r weitere Informationen kontaktieren Sie bitte Thomas Jarek in der Galerie Eva Presenhuber. Parallel zu dieser Ausstellung zeigt die Galerie Eva Presenhuber die Ausstellung 'BLURRY RENOIR DEBUSSY' von Urs Fischer. �ffnungszeiten: Dienstag - Freitag 12 - 18 Uhr Samstag 11 - 17 Uhr N�chste Galerieausstellung: Douglas Gordon, 17. Januar - M�rz 2009 Vernissage: Freitag, 16. Januar, 18 - 20 Uhr |
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