MARC JANCOU TO OPEN NEW GENEVA-BASED EXHIBITION SPACE ON THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 15TH
It is with great pleasure that we announce Jancou, Marc Jancou's new exhibition space in Geneva's rue des Bains, to open on Thursday, September 15th during the Nuit des Bains.
The inaugural exhibition, Forthcoming, will feature new work by American artist Carter.
Marc Jancou is pleased to announce the opening of Jancou, a new exhibition space in Geneva to exist under the aegis of Marc Jancou Contemporary in New York. Opening on September 15th, 2011, Jancou will present three to six exhibitions per year by both established and emerging artists from Switzerland and abroad. Located in the heart of Geneva’s art community, the Quartier des Bains, Jancou will present local and international contemporary art. Jancou aims to foster a trans-Atlantic creative dialogue, and to serve as a cultural bridge between New York and Geneva.
Marc Jancou’s professional history indicates his commitment to and passion for contemporary art. Born in Switzerland, he opened his first gallery, Galerie Marc Jancou, in Zürich in 1993. He went on to found a number of additional galleries, including London Projects, London (1996) and Bonakdar Jancou, New York (1998). From 2006 to 2007, he also hosted a residency program in St. Barts called Me.Di.Um, which included 25 residencies by international artists. Jancou’s current gallery, Marc Jancou Contemporary, New York, focuses on emerging and mid-career artists. The gallery has presented the first New York solo shows by Tim Berresheim, Ross Chisholm, Slawomir Elsner, Meredith James, Ry Rocklen, Stephanie Taylor, and Jacques Louis Vidal. Additionally, the gallery has a particular commitment to LA artists, such as Ginny Bishton, Larry Johnson, and Marnie Weber. The gallery’s full roster includes Michael Cline, Nick Lowe, Alan Michael, and Tomoaki Suzuki. Artist publications and catalogues are also a feature of the gallery.
In addition to this gallery program, Marc Jancou has initiated an ongoing series of exhibitions that take place in various international locations. In 2008, the exhibition In Geneva No One Can Hear Your Scream opened at BFAS Blondeau Fine Art Services, Geneva. The next exhibition in the series, Rive Gauche / Rive Droite, which was held in a variety of locations across Paris and featured 27 international artists, took place in the fall of 2010.
Given his strong personal and professional connections to Switzerland, Marc Jancou is delighted to embark upon a new and yet familiar road with Jancou in Geneva. Jancou’s inaugural exhibition, Forthcoming, will feature new works by American artist Carter, and will open on Thursday, September 15th, during Geneva’s Nuit des Bains. The exhibition will run through December 23.
Carter’s work can be described as a multi-media investigation into the shifting nature of the self. Gaining critical recognition in the past decade with his “anonymous” busts and films such as Erased James Franco (2008), Carter is conceptually preoccupied with issues pertaining to identity, specifically the power and possibility of anonymity. In his own words: “Anonymity is useful in that it allows you to explore/be/try/risk/portray different facets of one’s life and interests without being fully responsible for the outcome.” This perspective renders the classical beauty of Carter’s latest works, on view here, insightfully pertinent to this particular historical moment, a time when the melded social, political and technological currents of the postmodern age inspire a state of uncertainty and searching, on both a personal and global level. Sensually belabored with painting and drawing, paper and fabric, these textured canvases present poetic compositions that hover liminally between abstraction and figuration, resulting in an evocative, atmospheric aesthetic realm where faces and forms coalesce into a vision at once familiar and strange. A new element of Carter’s work, the sewn masks, contribute a layer of uncanny complexity, evoking laden and contrasting themes of memorial, mortality, presence and absence. Through Carter’s lens, the current human condition – fleeting, transient, multivalent – is profoundly legible.
Created at the artist’s studio at the tip of Long Island, these works are visibly inscribed with traces of the Atlantic Ocean, an association that additionally reveals notions of spirituality and fluidity, both physical and conceptual, within the series. As such, this new body of work has appropriately traveled across the watery expanse that separates America and Europe for its first presentation at Jancou, Geneva.
