Month: October 2007

Thomas Demand


Thomas Demand
November 10 – December 8, 2007

Taka Ishii Gallery is pleased to announce our second exhibition with Berlin-based artist,
Thomas Demand. A selection of Demand’s recent solo exhibitions (2007) includes the
Fondazione Prada, Venice and the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, as well as the
Serpentine Gallery, London (2006) and the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2005).
Demand’s work has been featured in group exhibitions within Japan at the National
Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto / the National Museum of Art Osaka (2006) as well as
the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo (2005).

Demand, trained as a sculptor, creates editioned film and photographic works in which
sculptures, constructed from paper and cardboard, are presented in mediated form. With
one recent exception, Demand does not exhibit the sculptural constructions themselves;
but, rather, always re-presents the work as image. This process is analogous to Demand’s
initial choice of source material – a great deal of the image material on which the
artist bases his work is culled from the media; empty spaces in which current or past
events of cultural/political import are presented in an anonymous, simplified form.
While Demand does not hide the background behind each image, he is not forthcoming as
works are typically provided with relatively anonymous, literally descriptive titles
such as “Shed” and “Lightbox.”

The Taka Ishii Gallery exhibition will include the presentation of two recent 35mm films,
Yellowcake and Camera, as well as recent photographic works. “Yellowcake” is a direct
reference to an intermediate step in the processing of uranium ores, and an indirect
reference to an event in which material was obtained from the Embassy of the Republic of
Niger in Rome, subsequently used by the United States and Great Brittain in an attempt to
provide proof of the government of Iraq’s attempts to secure material for the creation
of so-called weapons of mass destruction. While past Demand work was based upon
photogrpahic source material, in this instance no photographic documentation existed and
Demand had to rely upon his memory following a visit to the embassy in preparation for
the constuction of the sculpture. In Yellowcake the film, an interior within the embassy
is pictured; the lights within the space are once turned on and then, a few minutes later,
turned off; this is all that occurs -visibly- within the space of nearly 6 minutes. The
exhibition will also include a photographic detail of the embassy interior
as well as an equally enigmatic image, “Shed” from 2006.

Taka Ishii Gallery
Taka Ishii Gallery

HOBBY HORSE – YEAH, YEAH DADA ASIA


A show curated by Elaine W. Ng, publisher of Art AsiaPacific

HOBBY HORSE – YEAH, YEAH DADA ASIA

explores the work of artists whose practice relies heavily on the use of
appropriated material – beer cans, leather whips, stickers, trees, toy
soldiers, movie titles and wallpaper – as a form of social critique. The
origin of this practice is traced to the Dada movement that began at the
Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich in 1916, where a small association of radical
artists sought to disrupt meaning through a series of acts that included
critiquing traditional notions of art to exploring language, meaning and the
spectacle within art. Critical, raucous, anarchic, outrageous and
metaphorical, Dada in its various guises railed against the superficiality
and chaos of the world during World War I. Although its originators declared
the movement dead by 1921, the influence of Dada continues and now extends beyond
its European roots.

This group exhibition demonstrates Dada’s lasting impact on artists from the
Asia region today.

Gonkar GYATSO (Tibet)
Kesang LAMDARK (Tibet)
Caroline CHIU (HongKong)
Kin-wah TSANG (Hong Kong)
Jaishri ABICHANDANI (India)
Shezad DAWOOD (Pakistan)
Hiroshi SUNAIRI (Japan)

Drawn together


I have curated a drawing exhibition at Artboks in Århus, Denmark.
It opens on Friday and runs untill November 25th.
See attached flyer for further details.
And see the list of artists above.

cheers
HuskMitNavn

  • Husk Mit Navn

    • 
    

    BRIAN MONTUORI


    BRIAN MONTUORI
    SOLO EXHIBITION: TRAINING DAY
    OCTOBER 5 – NOVEMBER 3, 2007

    OPENING RECEPTION WITH THE ARTIST: FRIDAY, OCTOBER 5TH, 6 – 9 PM

    Galleri Loyal is pleased to present the gallery’s first solo exhibition of New York artist Brian Montuori. This is a double-barrel-filled exhibition: Torsgatan 53 AND 59!

    For this exhibition Montuori continues his depiction of animals in hyperbolically perilous scenarios. This current group of large-format paintings hinges around a central theme in which the artist envisages a circus train wreck’s disastrous impact. In full detail, Montuori renders the train breaking suddenly and violently apart, spilling the en-caged circus animal performers into their sudden, mortal freedom. The human element who has provided the vehicle for such an accident to occur, is nowhere to accept responsibility.

    Montuori uses the tranquility and beauty of classical landscape painting as a perfect stage to present the tragic scene of disorder and chaos. Painted with a deft variation of styles which he conducts seamlessly, Montuori breaks from tradition, finding new techniques to portray the active motion. Montuori describes the exquisite agony of this explosion of fire and carnage while also maintaining an intangible humor which penetrates the despair.

    Born in 1977, Brian Montuori lives and works in New York. Montuori has completed a solo exhibition at Christian Ehrentraut in Berlin, Germany where he presented a wall-sized painting of his representation of Noah’s Ark gone asunder. This piece was recently acquired by Sammlung Essl in Vienna, Austria.

  • Loyal

    • Markus Vater


    Markus Vater
    Basic Patterns of Fear and Conversations with Animals

    We are delighted to welcome you to our first exhibition in our additional temporary gallery – art agents out of space – in the rooms of the Agency for Contemporary Art – Christoph Grau.

    Markus Vater’s (*1970) paintings and drawings usually raise questions and only sometimes make assertions. These are philisophical questions addressed to our perception of the world, to communal life in our society and the influence of the media on the individual. He humourously rather than scientifically conceives figurative scenes, text collages and drawings reminiscent of cartoons and image. The border between phantasy and reality is irrelevant to Markus Vater and yet his statements are often very political. For example he asks: „Why is the world dominated by countries with changing seasons?“
    Two separate series are shown in the exhibition: large format figurative works that initiate an open dialogue with the 1961 published book “Basic Patterns of Fear“ by the pychologist Fritz Riemann. In accordance with the rule of three principle, Markus Vater combines future, water, fear and charity to come to the conclusion that fear is the American root of water divided by future plus charity.
    The second series consists of paintings and drawings addressed to animals: a painting for a cat, a painting for a bee, a painting for an elk. From a diametrically opposite view, these non-verbal and non-figurative compositions raise the question of the reception by the desired addressee. And should the viewer in the end not grasp the complexity, it might help to use Markus Vaters stenzil for the german saying “to paint the devil on the wall”.

  • Art Agents