|
Galerie Anita Beckers: GROUP SHOW - KOTA EZAWA - 24 Apr 2009 to 27 June 2009 Current Exhibition |
||||
|
Kota Ezawa
Hand Vote, 2008, Wood and paint 51 x 61 x 38 cm / 20 x 24 x 15 in |
|||
|
||||
|
||||
|
Kota Ezawa � Group Show Opening: Friday, April 24th, 2009 from 7.00 p.m. Duration: April 24th through June 27th, 2008 �Group Show� is an individual exhibition including work in video, film, photography, painting and sculpture by San Francisco-based artist Kota Ezawa to be seen at Galerie Anita Beckers until the 27th of June. �Group Show� applies the concept of a multi artist group exhibition to the work of a single artist, addressing a range of subjects from contemporary culture to the history of art and presents a variety of formal strategies like abstraction and representation. In its entirety �Group Show� attempts to redefine the idea of a group show as a conceptual frame for a solo exhibition. Mostly portraying scenes of events which have become memorable to all of us, Kota Ezawa patiently builds his works manually, frame by frame as a sort of digital approximation of paper-cutout animation. Instead of filtering his source images through software technology making them look like animations, Kota Ezawa manually reconstructs them using drawing software. The result is a synthetic representation with very few colours and barely any details, as �Photo Secession� testifies. Based on a known photograph showing Alfred Stieglitz�s famous photo gallery in New York in the twenties, �Photo Secession� could be seen as the title piece of the current show. The same way Stieglitz� show gathered iconic photos and stated the autonomy of the medium, Ezawa�s �Group Show� critically and intensively deals with historical images and the medial distance caused by their two dimensional digital treatment. Somewhere in the crossroad between popular culture, political action and art, Kota Ezawa�s vibrantly coloured, stylized and flat images have been compared by many to a Warhol silkscreen or a South Park cartoon. �Brawl� (2008), a four-minute-animation-film, follows exactly this information reduction strategy which has become Ezawa�s trademark. Based on a You Tube video showing an infamous 2004 brawl which resulted in the suspension of 9 NBA players, the film emphasizes the artist�s subliminal interest on space issues generated by the transposition of images generated in other medium into the specific language of the animation format. �Lyam 3 D� (2008), a silent animation based on the seminal Resnais� film �L�Ann�e derni�re � Marienbad�, takes up the challenge of translating the greatness of cinematography language into a camera less technique like animation. Focusing exclusively on the original shots in which the actors remained almost motionless, �Lyam 3D� ends up achieving an intense and unexpected architectural feeling. Always inspired by iconic archival news, like �Riefenstahl� and �Schleyer�, or film footage Ezawa�s works seem to stress how the remembrance of the past has become inseparable from our mediated streaming images - from television, newspapers and cinema. Indeed, Ezawa�s stylistic method underlies how the articulation between memory and media is a relatively new and yet undeniable one, sometimes going so far as revealing how the way we generally remember or interpret events is decisively influenced by the media in which they were recorded. Thus exploring the way we use History and navigate its constructions, �Rocket Test� (2006) for instance, is based on the slide which Colin Powell presented to the UN Security to prove that Saddam Hussein produced weapons of mass destruction. Describing his own practice as a form of �video archaeology�, Ezawa�s focus on media imagery has a certain liberation feeling to it. Ultimately, Kota Ezawa`s laboriously technique is questioning how � in a media charged culture � historical images prevail in our collective memory making us wonder about its various levels of recognizability and fictionality. Liliana Rodrigues Born in 1969 in Cologne, Kota Ezawa studied at the D�sseldorf Kunstakademie, San Francisco Art Institute and Stanford University, and lives and works in San Francisco. His work has been hosted in such venues as the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art, New York, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Art Institute of Chicago. He has had solo exhibitions at the St. Louis Art Museum; Hayward Gallery,London; ArtPace, San Antonio; Santa Monica Museum of Art; Wadsworth Athenaeum, Hartford; and Charles H. Scott Gallery, Vancouver. Galerie Anita Beckers at Art Chicago, Booth 120 ART CHICAGO Merchandise Mart 353 West Street New York NY 10014 USA Opening Preview Thursday April 30th from noon to 8 pm General public Friday May 1st - Sunday 3rd from noon to 8 pm Monday 4th from noon to 5 pm. For the third time present at Art Chicago Fair, Anita Beckers show cases works reflecting on some of the pressing issues of our time. In the selection of work, the gallery�s presentation reflects on the way anxiety and crisis has permeated and impacted contemporary art. As artists reflect upon the current state of things, what aesthetic responses do they give us? The selection of artists for the Art Chicago presentation includes Teresa Diehl, Vee Speers, Flavia Da Rin, Liat Yossifor, Clare Langan, Arnold von Wedemeyer and Monica J�ger. Artist notes Teresa Diehl�s sculptural installations made from glycerine soap continue the sensual challenge of her work. At once solid and transparent, light-filled or opaque, the material challenges the form, be it military helicopters or missiles, through being both part of the substance of weaponry and a cleansing agent. The fragile objects hand sculpted by Diehl from the soap leave a residue when touched as though to suggest one can never leave unscathed the tumult unleashed on our world. The work of Vee Speers and Flavia Da Rin shows art pieces in which kids integrates in her daily life tools which gives you power. Flavia Da Rin�s portraits feel as though the she has stepped through the looking glass into a world of fantastical landscape and situations. The young woman�s face, including her wide eyes, looms large in these digitally manipulated photographs. In them she assumes different characters. Similarly fanciful though more disturbing are the children�s portraits of Vee Speers whose confrontational gaze creates a distinctly sinister aspect highlighted by the props the children wear or carry such as a gun, a gas mask, a boxing glove, a military helmet. This is no dress up exercise, but feels more like a preparation for the roles that they will soon inhabit. In Monica Ursina J�ger�s works, natural and urban landscapes blend into dystopian scenes in black and white. Disparate image fragments join to become narratives in which the political and the absurd go hand in hand. Jager�s condensed graphical and installative language radiates an apocalyptic mood. Clare Langan�s new video work also conveys an utter sensitivity to the authority and power of nature. The work captures a catastrophic yet natural phenomenon through abstracted high pitched images and chiaroscuro contrasts. By slowing down time and turning the camera on its side, Langan allows a deluge of ice from the flood-water to become materialised, catching the unpredictable and sometimes destructive essence of nature. In his video �Maezel�s Raum, on-time still life II�, Arnold von Wedemeyer shows several contradicting levels of time at once. It is the result of the computer controlled setting being photographed over the period of many weeks. As a result of the capture technique (each single image is a high resolution photograph), the video image seems extremely sharp, detailed and intriguing. The monochromatic paintings of Liat Yossifor initially draw us in with their seductive color and rich painterly strokes. Yet on closer observation the abstraction gives way to the subtle contours of human bodies, seemingly at the end of a deadly conflict. In a figurative co-relation to the denial, or refusal to see, we experience when exposed to unimaginable horror, the violence she portrays us nearly incomprehensible but then, as everything comes into focus, sadly and sickeningly familiar. We proudly present in room 13: KOTA EZAWA LOOP THE VIDEO ART FAIR '09 Hotel Catalonia Ramblas Pelayo, 28 08001 Barcelona, Spain Opening Preview Thursday, May 28, noon to 9 pm Professional and Press Vernisage: 19:30h (by special invitation only) General public Friday, May 29 4 to 9 pm Saturday, May 30 4 to 9 pm LYAM 3D is a silent digital animation of scenes from the seminal Resnais/Robbe-Grillet film, L'ann�e derni�re � Marienbad. Viewed through anaglyph red-green glasses, Ezawa�s 3D animation circles around the film which itself is almost hermetically circuitous by focusing on shots in which the actors remain nearly motionless, fixed to their baroque surroundings like models in a diorama. Yet as the animations move across the screen, the characters appear to shift endlessly in space. Ezawa disturbs our assumed proximity to the images, simultaneously flattening and deepening the film, distending and slowly warping its oblique topology. Born in 1969 in Cologne, Kota Ezawa studied at the D�sseldorf Kunstakademie, San Francisco Art Institute and Stanford University, and lives and works in San Francisco. His work has been hosted in such venues as the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art, New York, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Art Institute of Chicago. He has had solo exhibitions at the St. Louis Art Museum; Hayward Gallery, London; ArtPace, San Antonio; Santa Monica Museum of Art; Wadsworth Athenaeum, Hartford; and Charles H. Scott Gallery, Vancouver. "Group Show" is his current exhibition in our gallery and his first solo show in Germany until June 27th 2009. complementary presentation by 53rd BIENNALE di VENECIA participating artist ANDREA FACIU We all know how it feels to caress or to beat a human being, an animal or a thing. But how does it feel to touch a city, an urban conglomerate? A city as a large-scale conglomerate, built out of vivid and consolidated material, of the relationships and structures existing between them, between the real visible architecture of the street, of each kind of extroversion, and the � in a certain way � utopian architecture, in which we construct our networks and the required areas of action within society, by balancing virtues, im-possibilities, necessities and by searching the balance between the common and the special. We all personalise and characterise, fable-like, the places from which we come, where we are right now or those we want to reach, mostly without realising the exact point where our own subjectivity intersects an objectivity imposed by patterns of thought and definitions not of our own. It is about experiencing, feeling the cities and their inner life, including the inner lives of the people living in them. I actually touch them physically � and not only physically � I palpate and rummage, dirty my hands with their particular �DUST OF CIVILISATION�. (Andrea Faciu, 2007) Born in 1977 in Bukarest, Andrea Faciu studied at the Akademie der Bildenden K�nste in Munich from 1997 to 2004. Her work has been presented in such venues as MMK in Frankfurt and the Manifesta 5 in San-Sebastian, Spain. Andrea Faciu will participate at the upcoming Biennale di Venezia in 2009. Her latest installation �EXUBERANTIA suspended� will be part of the exhibition of the Romanian Pavilion. Galerie Anita Beckers Booth H8 VOLTA 5 Markthalle Viadukstrasse 10 Basel Switzerland Opening Preview Monday, June 8th, 12 - 4 p.m. (by special invitation only) General public Monday June 8th, 4 - 8 pm. Tuesday - Saturday, June 9th - 13th, 12 - 8 p.m. Special Early Opening: Wednesday June 10th, 10 a.m. - 12 p.m. We proudly present the following artists on our booth H8 CORNELIA RENZ & YVES NETZHAMMER Cornelia Renz Born in 1966 in Bavaria, Germany Cornelia Renz studied at the Academy of Visual Arts at Leipzig (�Hochschule f�r Grafik und Buchkunst�). Currently living and working in Berlin, she has been awarded with the �Marion Ermer Prize� (2001) and the �F�rderpreis Bildende Kunst� of the Schering Foundation (2005). Recent shows have included a solo presentation at Galerie Anita Beckers in Frankfurt (2007), Golf + Rosenthal in New York in 2006 and the group exhibition XV. Rohkunstbau �Drei Farben � Rot� at Villa Kellermann in Berlin in 2008. Cornelia Renz is represented in many private and public collections in Germany, the United Kingdom, the USA, Brazil and Japan. Yves Netzhammer Yves Netzhammer (Schaffhausen, Switzer and, 1970) lives and works in Zurich. From 1987 to 1990 he studied architecture at Schaffhausen, then moved to Zurich to complete his training in design and the visual arts. After exhibiting his works in solo shows in important venues like Kunsthalle Bremen, San Francisco MoMA, Kunt-Werke Berlin and winning a number of awards, Netzhammer represented Switzer and at its national pavilion in the Giardini di Castello at the most recent Venice Biennale and created a big installation for the Karlskirche Kassel during the documenta in 2007. His work is part of different public collections like Kunstmuseum Bern, Museum of Old and New Art (Mona) Hobard, West Collection Pennsylvania and the CB Collection Tokyo |
||||
re-title.com
International contemporary art
SIGN UP FOR NEWSLETTERS
SIGN UP for ARTIST MEMBERSHIP
SIGN UP for GALLERY MEMBERSHIP
Click on the map to search the directory