RICHARD PRINCE AND THE REVOLUTION An exhibition curated by Jonathan Monk
Artists: Dave Allen, Pierre Bismuth, Anne Collier and Matthew Higgs, Ryan Gander, Daiga Grantina, Isabell Heimerdinger, Tobias Kaspar, Annette Kelm, Scott Myles, Dan Rees, Kati Simons von Bockum-Dolffs
Opening: June 25, 19.30h. Exhibition: 25.06.09 > 10.09.09 Summer gallery hours: Monday to Friday from 11:00 to 19:00h. August closed for summer break.
�Any picture containing multiple images of excessive similarity, or 'sameness' or conditions to that effect, no matter how questionable the posture, is a benevolently powerful picture.� Richard Prince
�Appropriation is something I have used or worked within my art since starting art school in 1987. At this time (and still now) I realised that being original was almost impossible, so I tried using what was already available as source material for my own work. By doing this I think I also created something original and certainly something very different to what I was re-presenting. I always think that art is about ideas, and surely the idea of an original and a copy of an original are two very different things.� Jonathan Monk, 2009
It is a great privilege for ProjecteSD to present Richard Prince and the Revolution, the first exhibition curated by Berlin-based British artist Jonathan Monk for a Spanish gallery.
Richard Prince�s appropriations and reiterations of images and contents from American and Western everyday culture for his photographs, paintings, objects, drawings and fictional literary pieces have been among the most influential and radical artistic formulations since the late 1970�s. He was at the forefront of a generation of artists challenging ideas of authenticity, originality and the value of the unique art object. Appropriation is, undoubtedly, a key strategy in Jonathan Monk�s work. It is not coincidental then, that Monk has chosen Richard Prince�s legacy as the subject for this curatorial experience. In Richard Prince and the Revolution, Monk revisits Prince�s work through a group show with an interesting selection of a younger generation of artists: Dave Allen, Pierre Bismuth, Anne Collier and Matthew Higgs, Ryan Gander, Daiga Grantina, Isabell Heimerdinger, Tobias Kaspar, Annette Kelm, Scott Myles, Dan Rees and Kati Simons von Bockum-Dolffs. The ten artists present in the show use an approach that can be seen as a reactivation of some of the ideas, the motifs or the aesthetic codes found in Richard Prince�s oeuvre. The exhibition is about authenticity and originality, about repetition and re-appropiation. A collage from a myriad of works with direct or subtle allusions to Prince�s imagery. With elements of seduction and desire, collages, objects taken from popular culture, drawings, books, magazines or photographs, the show suggests a variety of models for the production and interpretation of art, which lead by Jonathan Monk, aims to test the continued strength of the Modernist canon and to demystify the creative process.
The medium of the book has always been a special category within Richard Prince�s oeuvre. The artist is an avid collector of rare books and has been a prolific maker of books. This is also a quality shared by Jonathan Monk. Books then are an important part in the show presented now. A library with an interesting selection of Richard Prince�s books is presented in the exhibition, as a connecting link to the rest of the works on view. Some of Prince�s well known titles such as Second House, Women, Spiritual America or newer books such as Naked Nurses or Jokes and Cartoons, are on view. To accompany these books and the show, Jonathan Monk has created a new artist book published specifically on the occasion of this exhibition and presented for the first time at ProjecteSD. Studio visit (2009) is an artist book by Jonathan Monk, edited by Tobias Kaspar and published in collaboration with JRP Ringier/Christoph Keller editions.
We remain indebted to Jonathan Monk for his great generosity and commitment in the development of this exhibition. Thank you so much to all the participating artists for their great contributions and enthusiasm in this project. Thank you also to their representing galleries: Tanya Bonakdar (New York), Elastic (M�lmo), Johann K�nig (Berlin), The Modern Institute (Glasgow), Jan Mot (Brussels) and T293 (Naples). And finally, thank you to Christoph Keller for his valuable contribution to the show, expertise and collaboration in the publication of Jonathan Monk�s Studio Visit.
Dave Allen, born in 1963, in Glasgow, lives and works in Stockholm Dave Allen's artistic practice is characterized by a strong interest in music. In the early 1990s he took a keen interest in the collective experience of pop and rock and their function in establishing identity within youth culture. More recently he has been working more and more with compositions of contemporary experimental music. In his transformations and translations into video installations, performances, drawings, sound installations, and works for radio, methods of textualization and communicative processes in general are significant.
Pierre Bismuth, born. 1963, Paris. He lives in Brussels. Bismuth�s oeuvre comprises drawings, collages and videos and is often based on the principle of the deconstruction of patterns of perception. For this he uses existing material such as pictures from newspapers and magazines, and film and sound extracts; he then decontextualises them and presents them as ready-mades. With humour and minimal means, Bismuth's work seeks to destabilize the codes of reading for even the most received forms of culture. His procedures seem to follow the laws of entropy by creating effects of constant transformation and spontaneous change, expending the excess energy of a system to reveal its paradoxes.
Ryan Gander , born 1976, Chester Gander harnesses art's potential to communicate and creates work in various written, spoken and visual languages. His practice adopts both familiar styles, such as cartoons and maps, as well as more avantgarde aesthetics. By appropriating existing art and design work to generate new pieces, Gander creates fictional histories, traced from real historical moments and turning points in visual culture. As such the exhibition thematically investigates notions of copyright, intellectual property and the issues surrounding ideas of documentation and collaboration, originality and meaning.
Annette Kelm , born in Stuttgart 1975 Annette Kelm's photographs often display simple motifs. At first their objects appear familiar and the perspective seems ordinary and clear. The format of her images often matches the size of the real object. Photographed in front of a neutral background, the displayed objects or people look extracted, isolated and abstract. There is no horizon to situate them within any kind of context; likewise no shadows are cast. And yet, the objects look like sculptures. Light, shading, and a sense of three dimensionality emerge solely from the image itself. Annette Kelm's images gain their characteristic plasticity and depth from her photographic technique. In order to shoot her motifs, the artist uses middle and large format cameras, and employs light with great precision. In the darkroom she painstakingly determines the format of the image in several stages. Annette Kelm's photographs combine a carefully hands-on production with a thoughtful process of composition. Kelm conceptualizes the subjects of her images first without ever approaching a real motif. But, she finds the image in a slow process in which she brings about new and unfamiliar relations by interfering minimally, by composing and staging. Hats, cars, fabrics, or musical instruments look familiar and show off their traces of use. The stories and images, which her works generate within the viewer remain ambiguous. Whether staged as mass produced items or as unique copies, there is often a confusing and irritating element to the image causing the different narrative strands to cross and diverge. Following art historical rules of composition and genre�for instance classical photography at its inception�in a hardly noticable manner, Annette Kelm disarranges and rearranges seemingly familiar objects in a set of unfamiliar relations. Within her artistic practice Annette Kelm has created a self-contained photographic practice that is able to liberate itself from more recent traditions like the school of Bernd and Hilla Becher.
Anne Collier , Born 1970, Los Angeles, California; lives in New York, New York Matthew Higgs , Born 1964 in Wakefield, West Yorkshire, England. Lives and works in New York
I Married An Artist , 2008 Digital C-Print 51cm (h) x 42cm (w) Signed by both artists on the reverse of the print.
The work is a 'straight' photograph of a book both artists purchased in Toronto, the book is the autobiography of a woman - Billy Button - who was married to a prominent mid- 20th Century Canadian artist. The image has not been digitally altered in any way. The original edition was produced to benefit the NY not-for-profit gallery/publisher Printed Matter.
Over the past decade Anne Collier has forged a rigorous body of works that engage in a unique dialogue with contemporary photography. Collier produces tight, sparely formalized compositions often using a technique of re-photography. Using an approach that can be compared to artists like John Baldessari, Sherry Levine and Louise Lawler, Collier�s work addresses questions of biography and selfportraiture.
Matthew Higgs (b.1964 Wakefield, England) has exhibited internationally since 1992. Recent solo exhibitions include: The Apartment, Vancouver, Canada (2008); Jack Hanley Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (2007); and Murray Guy, New York (2006). In 2007 he had a two-person exhibition (with Peter Wuethrich) at the University of Massachusetts Gallery, Amherst, MA. Recent group shows include: 'A New High In Getting Low (NYC)', John Connelly Presents, New York (2008); and 'Two Years', Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2007/2008). This summer his work will be included in 'Not So Subtle Subtitle' curated by Matthew Brannon for Casey Kaplan gallery, New York.
Higgs is currently the Director and Chief Curator of White Columns, New York, where he has organized more than 125 individual exhibitions and projects in the past three years. A widely published writer and a regular contributor to Artforum magazine Higgs has recently contributed to publications for artists John McCracken, John Baldessari, Dave Muller, Ken Price, Ian Kiaer and Sara McKillop, and Kay Rosen, amongst others.
Scott Myles , born in Dundee in 1975 and lives and works in Glasgow. The oeuvre of Scottish artist Scott Myles is strongly gestural. It consists of photographs, objects, serigraphs, paintings and performance-based projects; a kind of reactivation of ideas on the valuation of art and social reality by means of the reuse of already established aesthetic codes. Thus, along with familiar art-historical works and their themes, concepts such as generosity or communication play a big role and, with this, the involvement of the subject in his/her own environment. Myles' works, however, always deal with his experience as an artist, with the role of the viewer, and a certain openly avowed romanticism vis-�-vis the values and the works he reactivates.
Dan Rees , born in 1982, Swansea, Wales. Lives and works in Berlin. Dan Rees studied at Camberwell College of Arts (2001-4)and St�delschule, Frankfurt (2007-8) before relocating to Berlin.
Solo exhibitions include MOT International (with Alan Brooks), London (2008); Something To Fill That Empty Feeling, Galeria T293, Naples (2007); Things I Did When I Was A Young Man, Mission Gallery, Swansea (2007); Three Works in September, Parade Gallery, London (2007); Music to my Years, Galerie Mille d'Air, Berlin (2006);
Selected group exhibitions include The Store, Tulips and Roses, Vilnius (2008); The World Is Flat, Overgarden, Copenhagen (2008); Freunde und Bekannte, Sparwasser HQ, Berlin (2008); Off Pages, The Bookmakers, Turin (2007); Without,, Curated by Adam Carr, Galerie Yvon Lambert, Paris (2007); The Moment You Realise You Are Lost, Galerie Johan Koenig, Berlin (2007); Deadpan Exchange, Super Bien, Berlin (2007); Future Show, Zustand, Berlin (2007); Can Your Eyes See The Love In Our Eyes, Galerie Mille d'Air Berlin (2007); Some Time Waiting, Kadist Art Foundation, Paris (2007); For One Day Only, Kadist Art Foundation, Paris (2006); Today Is A Beautiful Day, Nog Gallery, London (2006); Known and the Unknown, Gallerie Nicolai Wallner, Copenhagen (2006); Home for lost ideas, Galerie General Public, Berlin (2006).
