Month: January 2008

Jonathan Hernández


Jonathan Hernández
Licht und Shatten (por fin)

“Confrontation between spirit and light is what moves us.”

Light and Shadow
– Ludwig Wittgenstein

MC is pleased to announce Licht und Shatten (por fin), with a new
installation by Mexican artist, Jonathan Hernández. This is also the
artist’s first solo exhibition in the US.

Licht und Shatten, borrows its title from an essay by Wittgenstein, in
which the author compares light to knowledge. The installation consists
of a human-size, white fist indenting a part of the gallery wall, which
strives to engulf the large empty space with its strong gesture frozen
in time. The installation balances the urgency and ideals contained in a
violent act with the overwhelming weight of space and emptiness. Its
limited presence blends into the space and the gesture can either
confront the viewer directly or easily be missed. The impossibility of
change lingers. With emptiness and silence ruling the gallery, our
attention clings onto the minimal gesture left behind by the artist, and
shifts slowly to the void in which we stand.

As with each project realized by MC, a multiple work by Jonathan
Hernández will be published during the exhibition. This will add to MC’s
growing collection of editions, examples of which can be seen at the
gallery or online at on our new website www.mckunst.com .

Jonathan Hernández lives and works in Mexico City, Mexico and is
represented by kurimanzutto (Mexico City). In 2007, he presented a 24
hour cinema marathon project in Mexico City. Past solo exhibitions
include Tiempo perdido, Ganada y empatado (2007) at Fundacion RAC in
Spain, Postpreterito (2006) at the Sala de Arte Publico Siqueirios in
Mexico City and Trafago (2004) at kurimanzutto. His work is also
currently on view at the New Museum (New York) in their inaugural
exhibition, Unmonumental. Hernández has been in group exhibitions at
Gagosian, New York (2007), Fragmentos Sonoros (2007) at Ex Teresa Arte
Actual, Mexico City, the International Triennial of Architecture in
Lisbon, Portugal and the Biennale of Contemporary Art, Moscow, Russia.
MC Kunst




‘the Strange’


A View at ‘the Strange’
Featuring
Martin Bigum, Olafur Eliasson, Christian Lemmerz, Allan Otte, Lars Bent Petersen, Torben Ribe, Christian Schmidt-Rasmussen, Lisa Strömbeck, Alexander Tovborg

The exhibition A View at ‘the Strange’ show works of art, which somehow points to the subject ‘the strange’ or ‘the strangers’. In a less gentle or poetic way the exhibition aims at reminding us of our behavior toward ‘the strange’ – and our perception of the spaces we share with each other.

The exhibition contains sculptures, paintings, drawings and photography. With this variety of works – which is represented by several generations of artists – it is the intention to create a dynamic group exhibition were the contrasts give space for the freedom of speech.
Bendixen Art

DETAINED by Jenny Holzer!


Jenny Holzer
DETAINED

Monika Sprüth Philomene Magers is pleased to present DETAINED, an installation by Jenny Holzer. Beginning with her 2004 exhibition at the Kunsthaus Bregenz in Austria, Holzer has made the study of declassified US government documents the content for her context-based practice. Incorporating memos, sworn statements, emails, directives, judgments, and other government materials regarding the situation in the Middle East into paintings, large scale light projections, and electronic signs, Holzer has harnessed a variety of approaches to make sensate the accounting of war and torture. From documentation to material and situational renderings of bureaucracy’s operations, Holzer’s presentations of, among others, Department of Defense, White House, CIA, and FBI documents commingle the need to “get the word out” with the urgency to translate those words to a physical register. By activating the senses of the viewer, Holzer recasts the anonymity and indirection of government and administrative language as affecting and wounding objects. Holzer makes material Hannah Arendt’s claim that, “Nothing we use or hear or touch can be expressed in words that equal what we are given by the senses.”

In DETAINED, Holzer exhibits new works including a series of paintings and a large LED configuration. Each oil on linen painting depicts a handprint of an American soldier accused of crimes in Iraq, including detainee abuse and assault. Culled from documents made public through the Freedom of Information Act, Holzer’s paintings refuse to be read from the fixity of any one ideology. Hanging the hands of the charged next to those of the wrongly accused and those whose culpability has been lost, the artist represents the fog of war. In her LED artwork, Holzer stacks ten semi-circular signs to animate the front gallery wall. The piece, entitled Torso, displays in red, blue, white, and purple light the statements, investigation reports, and emails from the case files of the accused soldiers. Providing these voices, part damning, contradictory, sympathetic, banal, anecdotal, and evidentiary, Holzer layers accounts of abuse and blame. The installation lays bare that it is the individual who suffers and confronts the mechanics of politics and war. DETAINED makes substantial Wislawa Szymborska’s lament and statement in her poem “Tortures” that “the body is and is and is and has nowhere to go.”

A gallery in the Italian Pavilion of the 2007 Venice Biennale was devoted to Holzer’s continuing series of declassified document paintings. A large-scale traveling exhibition of the artist’s work, focusing on her output from 1990 to the present, will first open at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago in October 2008.

Jenny Holzer has presented her ideas, arguments, and sorrows in public places and international exhibitions, including the Venice Biennale, the Reichstag, London’s City Hall, and the Guggenheim Museums in New York and Bilbao, since the late seventies. Her medium, whether formulated as a T-shirt, as a plaque, or as an LED sign, is writing, and the public dimension is integral to the delivery of her work. Starting with the New York City posters, and up to her recent light projections and paintings based on declassified government documents, her practice has rivaled ignorance and violence with humor, kindness, and moral courage. Holzer received the Leone d’Oro at the Venice Biennale in 1990. She lives and works in New York.

Spruethmagers

No fixed address by Tv Moore


No fixed address

As if opening a time capsule – both a container for preserving treasures and a historical record waiting to be discovered at some future time – TV Moore’s works reveal a poignant and magical tension. Combining excerpts from documentary films with references to the experimental cinema, music, video theatre and performance, the Australian artist brings a suspended and hypnotic atmosphere to seemingly normal situations. By concentrating and intensifying such marginal moments, and despite the immediate simplicity of the familiar images he employs, Moore portrays eerie events which offer a multiplicity of interpretations.

Tv Moore’s first solo show in Berlin “No Fixed Address” is a profound and multi-layered investigation of a melancholic wanderer evoking the notions of transience and of being an outsider. The idea of not having a home as having lost it or for being unable to return home in unforeseen circumstances, a vagabond though perhaps a common individual. We are let to drift through a sombre and almost monochromatic installation. Upon entering the space we also enter a landscape of the mind, which deals with the identities of people and places and how man has either chosen or been forced into dynamic modes of living, either due to natural or man-made disasters.

In his large video projection titled “The Forgotten Man” Moore focuses in on material from the late 1960′ about vagrants and bohemians inhabiting Sydney’s central red-light disctrict of Kings Cross. Built as a documentary, but with the artist revoicing the original voices of all the characters, the work talks about misfits and transience which highlights the difficult attitude of feeling rooted in a place, The Forgotten Man simply gives life to the perspective of these characters, dealing contemporaneously with a light and elegant touch to ponder on history and gentrification, poverty and capitalism from many different perspectives.

Again in Moore’s work “Taps”, the title a reference to haunting bugle call, we foresee an imminent sense of loss or failure. A woman sings the melancholy hymn of Taps, “an ode to something gone, perhaps”, as the artist describes it. We bear witness in close up on her face, and her eyes are covered as if she is wearing a mask. We are not privy to the details or the context of this senario and as time dilates endlessly and gives us the feeling that something indeed has gone wrong! which is amplified by the fact that Taps is usually played at a soldier’s burial.

On another level the photograph Rebuild or Leave shows a delapidated and abandoned detached house. Ruins and isolation – whilst oftentime caused by the power of natural forces beyond our will – befall on what is supposed to be a secure foundation. Having lost its original function, the image of the house then becomes a mirror for the condition of disruption on the idea of the home, of having no fixed place. Here again is a suspended feeling of estrangement of place and time, TV Moore has himself not had a fixed house for 3 years.

Galerie Davidegallo

REAL.LY?


REAL.LY?
17 January – 1 March 2008
 
Photo exhibition that challenges our perception of reality. New works by Adam Jeppesen, Astrid Kruse Jensen, Birgitta Lund and Jesper Rasmussen.
 
The opening show will take place on January 17, from 17-20.
 
The gallery participates at Market art fair in Stockholm, February 15-17, 2008
 
PL Gallery

JOSH SMITH: "UNSTABLE IDEAS."


JOSH SMITH: “UNSTABLE IDEAS.”

SOME POSSIBLE – BUT MOSTLY REFUTED – QUOTES AND OPENING SENTENCES FOR A PRESS RELEASE OF JOSH SMITH

1.)    The unpersonal is personal (again).

2.)    Karl Kraus: “The more closely you look at a word the more distantly it looks back.”

3.)    This exhibition will consist of twelve large and twenty small paintings made between 2007 and 2008.

4.)    There are two artists named Josh Smith. This is the other one.

5.)    In Josh Smith’s paintings traditional categories of ‘representation’ and ‘abstraction’ lose their value, for – as described by the French art historian and writer Hubert Damisch – “the purpose of awakening in the spectator the uneasiness with which the perception of a painting should be accompanied”.

6.)    As if stuck on repeat, the 20 canvases occupying the first wall in this exhibition give the same message: “JOSH SMITH, UNSTABLE IDEAS, STANDARD OSLO 17.01.-16.02.2008”

7.)    The personal is unpersonal (again).

8.)    The exhibition “Unstable Ideas” sees Josh Smith continue his discussion of production, reproduction and non-production in regards to ‘the readymade painting’.

9.)    Frank Black: “Hang on to Your Ego”

10.)  Wikipedia.org: “Disambiguate |ˌdisamˈbigyoōˌāt| verb [ trans. ]: remove uncertainty of meaning from (an ambiguous sentence, phrase, or other linguistic unit).”

11.)  In Josh Smith’s collage paintings – layered newspaper ads, concert posters and take-out menus, intertwined with printouts of the artist’s works – there is a transformation as much as an appropriation of material, allowing these to become more sculptural and performative.

12.)  Josh Smith’s paintings are fairly easy to identify: they have his name painted all over them.

 
This is Josh Smith’s second solo exhibition at STANDARD (OSLO). Since graduating from the University of Tennessee in 1998, Smith’s works have been subject to a number of gallery exhibitions in Paris, Oslo, London, Brussels, New York, Detroit and Chicago, as well as museum solo exhibitions such as “Dial J for Josh” at The Power House in Memphis. Other recent exhibitions include last year’s Lyon Biennial, in addition to “USA Today” at the Saatchi Gallery / Royal Academy of Arts, London, “The New Yorker” at Kunsthalle Zürich, “Uncertain States of America” at the Astrup-Fearnley Museum, Oslo, and the Serpentine Gallery in London. This year Smith will also have a solo exhibition with the Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig in Vienna.

Standard Oslo