Sadie Coles HQ
35 Heddon Street
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London
United Kingdom
Europe
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MATTHEW BARNEY, Image � the Artist, courtesy Sadie Coles HQ & Gladstone Gallery, NY New Sun, 2007, C-print in self-lubricating plastic frame 48 x 45 x 1 1/4 inches. Edition of 6 + 1 AP
MATTHEW BARNEY Sadie Coles HQ off-site 53 Central Street London EC1 October 02 to November 17 2007
CHRISTIANA SOULOU Sadie Coles HQ 35 Heddon Street London W1 October 9 to November 24 2007
URS FISCHER Sadie Coles HQ 9 Balfour Mews London W1 October 11 to November 17 2007
RUDI STINGEL Sadie Coles HQ 69 South Audley Street London W1 October 13 to November 24 2007
Sadie Coles HQ is pleased to announce the opening of four exhibitions to celebrate the expansion of the gallery. A new gallery at 69 South Audley Street, designed by Douglas Stewart Architects, will open at the end of the frieze art fair with an exhibition by Rudolf Stingel. In the same week two further exhibitions, one by Christiana Soulou at 35 Heddon Street and one by Urs Fischer at 9 Balfour Mews will open on 9 and 11 October. A further off-site exhibition by Matthew Barney will be open from 29 September until the end of November, at 53 Central Street.
MATTHEW BARNEY 29 September � 29 November 2007 53 Central Street London EC1 (HQ off-site) Private view 14 October 6-8pm
Sadie Coles HQ is pleased to announce their first exhibition with acclaimed artist Matthew Barney. Since the early nineties his work has spanned all media - film, sculpture, photography, drawing, and performance � in order to capture the meticulous vision of his masterworks. This exhibition, his first commercial show in London, will consist of three sculptures and a photograph related to his recent project DRAWING RESTRAINT 9.
DRAWING RESTRAINT 9 is the most complex installment in an ongoing series is to explore �resistance as a pre-requisite for development and a vehicle for creativity.� The feature film DRAWING RESTRAINT 9 features Barney and musician Bj�rk, who also scored the film, as Occidental Guests aboard a whaling vessel in the Sea of Japan who�s seemingly predestined meeting results in an unconventional romance. Throughout the work, Barney addresses various themes surrounding the history and culture of Japan including the Shinto religion, the tea ceremony, the history of whaling, and the sub-plantation of blubber with refined petroleum for oil.
The three sculptures featured in this exhibition are each a portrait of the film�s main protagonists: the male and female characters and the whaling ship, whose subsequent transformations power the film�s action. Barney creates sculptures recalling the architecture of the vessel and the physical transformations that take place, reflecting on the relationship between the Japanese Hosts and the titular Occidental Guests.
Matthew Barney was born in 1967 and studied art at Yale University. He has received numerous awards including the Aperto prize at the 1993 Venice Biennale and the 1996 Hugo Boss Award. He has been included in group exhibitions worldwide such as Documenta IX in Kassel, Germany; the Whitney Biennials of 1993 and 1995; and the goundbreaking �Post-Human� exhibition in 1992. His solo exhibition �The Cremaster Cycle,� organized by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, traveled to the Museum Ludwig, Cologne, and the Mus�e d�Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. The large-scale exhibition of the entire �Drawing Restraint� series toured to San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the 21st Century Museum of Modern Art in Kanazawa, Japan, and the Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul, Korea, in 2005.
CHRISTIANA SOULOU 09 October � 24 November 2007 This dust was gentlemen and ladies 35 Heddon Street London W1 Private view 09 October 6-8pm
�Conceivably, drawing may be the most haunting obsession the mind can experience� - Paul Val�ry
Christiana Soulou�s first solo show at Sadie Coles HQ comprises a recent series of her deceptively delicate drawings. While drawing has recently experienced a renewed importance in the art world as a primary rather than a secondary medium, for Soulou it has always been an exquisite end in itself.
The title of the show, inspired by an Emily Dickinson Poem, is evocative of both Soulou�s strong literary grounding as well as her fascination with the enigma of death.
Born of her hazy obsessions, for the most part focusing on the human body, Soulou�s activity is investigative, diagrammatic, at times bordering on the anatomical. Indeed, in her writings Soulou reflects on the studies of curvilinear perspective by the sixteenth-century Clouet brothers and twentieth century mathematician G�del Kurt�s incompleteness theorem. Yet with bones made visible, faces disappearing, and limbs silently absent, her images have an intoxicating effect that regularly leads the viewer to lay personal claim to the visions they perceive. Often described as ghostly but with an assuredness of line firmly grounded in the present, Soulou�s drawings possess a curious permanence. Haunting and insistent, the intensity of Soulou�s drawings is formidable.
Christiana Soulou was born in Athens in 1961. She studied at the Ecole Nationale Sup�rieure des Beaux Arts, Paris. She has staged two solo shows in Athens (2003, 2006, Galerie 3) and one in Paris (2004, Galeries Samy Kinge). She has participated in group exhibitions including Petite impertinence, Cachan, France (1996), and Panic Room: Works from The Dakis Joannou Collection, DESTE, Athens (2005), Dream & Trauma: Works from The Dakis Joannou Collection, Vienna (2007). She also took part in Of Mice and Men, the 4th Berlin Bienniale. A new book of the artist�s writings is being published by DESTE, to complement the foundation�s current exhibition Fracture: Figure (2007). She lives and works in Athens.
URS FISCHER 11 October � 17 November 2007 Uh... 09 Balfour Mews London W1 Private view 11 October 6-8pm
For his third show for Sadie Coles HQ, Urs Fischer transforms a storage space in Mayfair into a scene of gloomy contemplation. In this exhibition entitled Uh..., perhaps to reflect the moment of revelation or contemplation of its content, there is a work that could be described as �a volume sculpture�. An investigation of space, the work is a continuation of the artist�s exploration of vanitas previously manifest in skeletons and melting bodies of wax (as in his first show for HQ that included What if the phone rings (2003)). Talismanic, the installation possesses a physical presence so audacious that surprises and shocks in equal measure.
Spontaneous and unpredictable, Fischer says �My work never ends up looking the way I intended... all that matters is if the artwork takes on a life of its own.� Many of his pieces begin in play and consistently evidence their experimental evolution, even when highly finished, and they often appear in a state of decay or metaphysical transformation. If the entropic space between opposites is one of Fischer�s staples, the alchemy of the commonplace is another � furniture and fruit being among his favourite subjects. Brimming with voodoo or shamanistic energy, Fischer�s works positively palpitate with anthropomorphism, eliding definition between beautiful and ugly, elegant and awkward, graceful and burdened.
Urs Fischer was born in Switzerland in 1973. He has had solo shows throughout Europe and USA, including Urs Fischer: Kir Royal, Kunsthaus Z�rich, Switzerland (cat.) and Pompidou Centre, Paris (cat.), both in 2004. His work has been included in numerous group shows including the Venice Biennale in 2003, 2005, and 2007 and is currently on display in Fracture/Figure at DESTE in Athens, Greece.
RUDOLF STINGEL 13 October � 24 November 2007 69 South Audley Street London W1 Private view 13 October 6-8pm
For the inaugural show of the new gallery of Sadie Coles HQ, at 69 South Audley Street, renowned Italian artist Rudolf Stingel continues his exploration of the viewer�s physical encounter with the artwork. Upsetting notions of authenticity and context, an imposing single three-panel painting re-imagines a famous modern masterpiece. It mimics the moment in which this work is seen for the first time, as an image in a library book, black and white. In keeping with the perceived disjuncture between the real and the imagined, the exact subject matter of the painting will be revealed only when the show opens to the public.
Currently the subject of a major survey show at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, (until 14 October 2007), Stingel is celebrated for his rigorous and critical approach to painting. Immersed in minimalist, conceptual, and performative histories, Stingel�s use of a wide-range of everyday, unconventional materials such as carpet, rubber and Styrofoam, consistently challenges the purity of the medium. Of the exhibition at the Whitney Roberta Smith has written in the New York Times: "For nearly 20 years [Rudolf Stingel] has made work that seduces the eye while also upending most notions of what, exactly, constitutes a painting, how it should be made and by whom." Beginning and ending with one of Stingel�s installations of aluminum-coated panels into which previous viewers had been invited to carve, the Whitney�s show clearly traces his shift from early abstract monochromatic works (from 1987), to more recent oversized, melancholic self-portraits that deal with figuration and the translation of photography (from 2006). In its variety and ambition Stingel�s practice insists on a constant and radical evaluation of both painting�s limits and possibilities in which the viewer is complicit throughout.
Rudolf Stingel was born in 1956 in Merano, Italy. He lives and works in New York and Bolzano, Italy and previously exhibited a series of gold wallpaper paintings at Sadie Coles HQ in 2004.
