Month: February 2009

Sprüth Magers Berlin is delighted to present Cindy Sherman’s first exhibition of new work in Europe since 2004. The fourteen colour photographs assembled develop Sherman’s longstanding investigation into notions of gender, beauty and self-fashioning, and reveal a particular concern to probe experiences and representations of aging. Working as her own model for more than 30 years, Sherman has developed an extraordinary relationship with her camera, and her audience, capturing herself in a range of guises and personas which are by turn alarming and amusing, distasteful and poignant. A remarkable performer, subtle distortions of her face and body are captured on camera, leaving the artist unrecognizable as she deftly alters her features, and brazenly manipulates her surroundings.

To create her photographs, Sherman shoots alone in her studio, assuming multiple roles as author, director, make-up artist, hairstylist, wardrobe mistress, and of course, model. The idea and experience of getting dressed up and putting on a show is central to Sherman’s practice, yet Sherman is also careful to closely manage the detail of each performance. Every bulge of flesh, strand of hair, rouged cheek or wrinkled brow is deliberately orchestrated to construct a vividly real yet curiously inscrutable character. The tension between pathos and alienation which Sherman’s figures evoke in the viewer are heightened by the contexts in which they appear, always obviously staged and cleverly apposite. Her creations are photographed in front of a green screen, and then digitally inserted onto backgrounds which are shot and manipulated separately, scenarios which elaborate and complicate the narrative constructed by Sherman’s garb and gaze.

Each of the women which feature in Sherman’s new exhibition share an acute consciousness of glamour and social hierarchy, which is both disquietingly flagrant and sardonically relevant to contemporary obsessions with image and status. In one photograph (Untitled #465, 2008), the fiercely proud eyes of a woman installed in her warped and blurred country estate stare out of a face regrettably cracked and peeling with age, ill concealed by make-up, hair-dye or expensive pearls. In another work from the series (Untitled #467, 2008), a woman with a tight sequined skirt, fake gold jewellery and extravagant fake white nails also glares out, perhaps daring the viewer to call her trash, or ruefully acknowledging that this is what she is. It is ultimately impossible, however, to fix any stable narrative in Sherman’s work; different levels of pretence and authenticity operate and interact in her images to complicate any straightforward reading of her characters, or the stories they might tell the viewer.

Cindy Sherman’s work has been widely collected and exhibited by major museums throughout the world since 1980. Major solo exhibitions include the Serpentine Gallery, London and the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in 2003, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1998. Major group shows include Palazzo Grassi, Venice and the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London in 2006, the Guggenheim Museum, New York in 2003 and the Centre Pompidou, Paris and The Museum of Modern Art in 2000. She has been the recipient of a number of major awards over the course of her career, including the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship in 1983 and the MacArthur fellowship in 1995. Cindy Sherman lives and works in New York.

Sprueth Magers

From February 28 to May 10, 2009 the Württembergischer Kunstverein is showing the exhibition ‘No Room to Answer – Projections’ by the Swiss/U.S. artist duo based in Austin, Texas, Teresa Hubbard and Alexander Birchler. With seven video installations, the exhibition presents central aspects of Hubbard and Birchler’s work, which expands the narrative forms of theater and cinema in an unparalleled way.

In their elaborately produced video works-both filmically and architecturally-Hubbard and Birchler bring into play the shifts between the conscious and the subconscious, presence and absence, inwardness and outwardness. They fathom conflicts involving desire and repression, gender positions, remembering and forgetting. The house, or the dwelling, as an unstable space between home and haunting, frequently comes to the fore in their work as well.

Through their open narratives, which interweave agency and its spaces in a complex manner, Hubbard and Birchler unhinge the spatiotemporal order. Involved scenes include both real locations and mise-en-scènes appropriated by the artists based on personal experiences, historical research, and literary or filmic sources.

The European premiere of the video installation ‘Grand Paris Texas’ from 2008 is being hosted by the Württembergischer Kunstverein in Stuttgart. The protagonist of the work is ‘The Grand,’ a long-abandoned cinema in Paris, Texas-the same small town made famous by Wim Wenders through his 1984 film of the same name, without the actual town even having made an appearance. ‘Grand Paris Texas’ interweaves various narratives and metanarratives: about an obsolete site of filmic illusions, about a small town and its entanglements with Wim Wenders’s film as well as with the French capital, and about the techniques and production methods of filmmaking itself. In ‘Grand Paris Texas’, Hubbard and Birchler for the first time take up formats of the documentary so as to equally approach both real and imaginary spaces and situations.

Teresa Hubbard, born 1965 in Dublin, Ireland, and Alexander Birchler, born 1962 in Baden, Switzerland, have been working together since 1990. Their works have been shown in numerous biennials, including the Venice Biennale (1999), the Busan Biennale (2008), or the Liverpool Biennial (2008) and in exhibition venues like the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington D.C., the Museum of Contemporary Art at the Kunstmuseum Basel, the Hamburger Bahnhof–Museum for Contemporary Art in Berlin, the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich, the Whitney Museum in New York, the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, and the Reina Sofía in Madrid.

A catalogue accompanying the exhibition with essays by Sara Arrhenius, Iris Dressler, and Andrea Karnes has been published.

WKV Stuttgart

“It takes two”
My first big solo show in New York City.
75 new paintings, drawings, photos, sculptures….
At LaViolaBank Gallery, 179 East Broadway

My homepage has been updated.
New photos of exhibitions and other projects

Husk Mit Navn.com
LaViolaBank

Jonathan Meese
“CASINOZ BABYMETABOLISMN”
(Put DR. NO’S MONEY in your
mouth, Baby)

Modern Art

Between Bridges

Wilkinson Gallery

TIMO HEINO

In my exhibition Entwinings I have fused the
material manifestations on human and non-human
processes – wasp’s nests and globular pieces of
my own making – so that their boundaries cannot be clearly perceived.

The wasp’s nest resembles ashes resemble each
other to some degree in composition. The nest,
however, has a distinct structure and solid form
held together by the secretion of the wasp.
Similarities can be seen between the structure of
the wasp’s nest and the conception of Antiquity
regarding the structure of the world. According
to the latter, the world was composed of a series
of spheres within each other, with man at its
centre. The wasp’s nest is constructed in
precisely this way in relation to its
inhabitants. At its core are the cells, the
centre of the wasp community’s habitat, and it is
from here that the wasps venture on their
food-gathering expeditions into “outer space” beyond the nest.

In 1964, two years before the earth was
photographed from outer space for the first time,
a textbook of geology noted that “races whose
horizons are limited to tribal territory, a
mountain valley, a small strip of shoreline or
the blocks of a crowded city” cannot have any
idea of the real nature and extent of the world
around them. If true knowledge is acquired only
by viewing the world from outside, this claim is
self-evidently true. It is precisely this
visually based assumption that has provided us
with the image of the world as a globe. It also
gives primacy to knowledge acquired by looking at
globular models in comparison with knowledge that
we obtain by actively taking part in the events of our surroundings.

Unlike solid globes that can be inspected only
from the outside, membranous layers or spheres
must be viewed from the inside. The global
perspective could thus be called centripetal and
the spherical perspective centrifugal. The
spherical perspective also resembles the relation
of a foetus in the womb with the outside world.

Unlike wasps, people do not, in global terms,
live inside their inhabited ball. It is a
noteworthy fact, though, that shelters
constructed for protection against catastrophes
are in caves excavated in the crust of the earth,
which means that safety is ultimately felt to be
found within the globe. As we now know, space
beyond our globe is not a fruitfully beneficent
environment as in the case of wasps. Despite
laborious and ever further reaching exploration
into outer space, life or even any matter
suitable for nutrition has not yet been observed beyond Earth.

In the ancient past man felt that he lived at the
centre of several layers of spheres surrounded by
material ether, while according to modern
knowledge he is travelling in an infinite void,
on the surface of a globe without any
destination, amidst countless planets without
life. What does it mean emotionally to man that
his consciousness of the ultimate foundation of being has changed?

Anhava

“Had Albrecht Durer made the storyboards for Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre one might have an easy portal for entering the practice of John Kleckner. An archival knowledge of how flesh dissimulates itself from bone, a revealing index of sexualized cadavers, an army of clit cops, the bearded vagina dentata manbear, used puppy hammers, an unceasing cancer of palimpsestuous forms of maybe the same figure over and over, face replaced, are only parts of the beginning. This is The 40 Seasons.

A decade in the life of Duchamp’s Étant donnés, 40 Seasons privies a viewer unto a keyhole intercourse, a peeping tom occupying a synapse of dreamlike depravity, a viewer who gives way to an orgiastic cornucopia of scientific scavenging and supine succubi; the hirsute’s rotten nose a liberated third eye. Images are dripped to form bulbous droplets of ink oozed from some baroque bioport. From the man’s shiny erection bursts forth a flower suddenly pollinated by a frenzy of insects.

Pathos hit with raking light recalls Goya’s late work where emergent characters poured from the prism of the Spaniard’s near blind eyes to be scrawled onto scraps of ivory and now here again with Kleckner onto thumbnails of paper, updated and yet ageless, actors from the absolute corner of one’s psyche. Victorian miniature portraits of bodies in search of anodyne pleasures, the black-eyed sorrow of some simulacric superhero bruised inside a grotto-esque dimension, 40 Seasons employs a draftsman’s scalpel of detailed incision upon every fold, crease, tear or slough of flesh as a means to illustrate an inner journey.”
–Aaron Moulton, excerpt from forthcoming catalog John Kleckner: The 40 Seasons.

Javier Peres is pleased to present John Kleckner’s second solo show with Peres Projects in Berlin. Kleckner will exhibit a suite of 40 works on paper more nearly two years in the making. His work is included the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, NY (The Judith Rothschild Collection of Contemporary Drawings), The Saatchi Gallery, London, Magasin 3, Stockholm, Sweden and The Deste Foundation Athens, Greece. Forthcoming exhibitions include “The Power of Paper”, The Saatchi Gallery, London, and “Rock Opera,” CAPC, Museum of Contemporary Art, Bordeaux, France.

Peres Projects

Gallery Christoffer Egelund is delighted to present Christian Just Linde’s solo exhibition Inner Search. Christian Just Linde (b. 1972) graduated from Florence Academy of Art in 1995, and since then he has worked intensively with sculpture, painting and drawing.
This exhibition presents more than 140 new drawings, which both explore and challenge the human mind. The good sides as well as the evil. Together the pieces manifest themselves as a gigantic organic form. This form, in itself a work of art, spreads over several walls in the gallery and thus cannot be perceived in its totality. The observer has to look deep into the depths of the individual works and into himself as well. The drawings have multiple levels of meaning, and the wealth of detail is both impressive and alluring, and it is from here that new dimensions and stories about emotions, dreams and demons constantly unfold.

Christiffer Egelund

Yukinori Maeda “UNIVERSAL LOVE”

Taka Ishii Gallery