Month: March 2009

Matthew Barney “Ancient Evenings: Libretto”


Matthew Barney
“Ancient Evenings: Libretto”

Gladstone Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new drawings by Matthew Barney from Ancient Evenings, a seven act opera loosely based on Norman Mailer’s 1983 Egyptian-set novel and currently in development by Barney and composer Jonathan Bepler.

Each act of the opera chronicles one of the seven stages that the soul passes through after the death of the body. Remaining true to the original theme of rebirth and reincarnation, Ancient Evenings recasts the central myth of Isis and Osiris in a contemporary industrial landscape. Barney has replaced the human body with the body of the 1967 Chrysler Imperial that was the central motif from his earlier film Cremaster 3. This exhibition will include drawings that explore the character and thematic development of the first two acts, entitled “Ren” and “Sekhem.” Obsessively drawn, Barney’s graphite drawings map the conceptual depths of each project rather than presenting storyboard-like narratives. Barney evokes his beautifully rendered imagery with the addition of non-traditional materials such as petroleum jelly and metal leaf, in addition to lapis dust and PCL, a plastic derived from crude oil. Alongside these drawings, Barney has taken seven copies of Mailer’s novel to create unique sculptures inside wall-mounted vitrines. Each piece contains one copy resting upon a bed of carved salt and opened to a spread that bears a drawing pertaining to one of the seven stages of the soul. In co-mingling Barney’s draftsmanship with passages that comprise the opera’s libretto, each book represents a different aspect of Barney’s new interpretation of Mailer’s novel.

Matthew Barney was born in 1967 and studied art at Yale University. He has received numerous awards including the Aperto prize at the 1993 Venice Biennale; the 1996 Hugo Boss Award; and the 2007 Kaiser Ring Award. He has been included in group exhibitions worldwide such as Documenta IX in Kassel, Germany; the Whitney Biennials of 1993 and 1995; and the groundbreaking “Post-Human” exhibition in 1992. His solo exhibition “The Cremaster Cycle,” organized by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, traveled to the Museum Ludwig, Cologne, and the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. The large-scale exhibition of the entire “Drawing Restraint” series was organized by the 21st Century Museum for Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, and traveled to Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Serpentine Gallery, London; and Kunsthalle Vienna. A retrospective of the Cremaster and Drawing Restraint videos was presented by the Fondazione Merz, Torino, in 2008.

Gladstone Gallery

John Stezaker The Bridge


John Stezaker
The Bridge

Friedrich Petzel Gallery is pleased to present The Bridge, a new exhibition of collages by John Stezaker.

John Stezaker has been highly influential in the key artistic developments of the last three decades, from Conceptual Art, New Image Art through to the re-emergence of collage. As a leading figure of the British Conceptual Art group, Stezaker showed in the first Hayward Annual of 1972 called ‘The New Art,’ but his conceptual interests soon gave way to what can now be seen as a long-term fascination with the image. Using found photographs and printed material, Stezaker involves various techniques in these collages, such as removals, maskings, reparations, rotations and visual concordances. While juxtaposing disparate sources his work creates compelling new images, relationships and characters.

The recent ‘Bridge’ works evolved from a series of topographical collages that began in the late ’80’s, involving combinations and inversions of the upper parts of cityscapes across a diagonal divide to create bridge-like spaces. These imaginary and gravity-defying spaces of ambiguity negotiate a void, above and below.

The source images are tourist books of Prague and its castle from the 1940’s to 50’s, collected originally by Stezaker because of his interest in the world of Kafka’s castle. The uncanny dream-like spaces evoked in these pictorial bridges have become more precarious in the most recent collages. They feel more imminently endangered – the atmosphere is more apocalyptic. They share with his better-known film portrait collages (also on view) a dark fascination with the fragility of the photographic illusion.

The portrait collages, which he describes as ‘marriages’ of different identities (often different sexes), become the site for the making and the unmaking of persona.

The ‘bridge’ and the ‘marriage’ are Stezaker’s metaphors for the collage process itself: a bringing of worlds together, a binding of the separated. But these acts of connection seem also only to reveal that what is bound is already falling apart. Collage in this sense is a kind of revelatory suspension of the image between the opposing forces of simulation and dis-simulation.

This is John Stezaker’s first solo exhibition at Friedrich Petzel Gallery in New York. Other recent solo shows include: ‘Mask and Shadow’ at the A Palazzo Gallery in Brescia, Italy (2008); John Stezaker ‘New Work’ at Galerie Dennis Kimmerich, Düsseldorf, Germany (2008); ‘Fumetti’ at GAK in Bremen, Germany (2008); A two part show: ‘Marriage’, Karsten Schubert, London and ‘Mask’, The Approach W1, London (2007); The Rubell Family Collection, Miami (2007); Stills Gallery, Edinburgh (2007); Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool (2007); Project Room, Yvon Lambert, Paris (2007).

Petzel

SO ME, 2 SHY & CREAM


Separated for far too long, the three brothers with silly nicknames, Cream, 2Shy and So Me, are finally reunited in, however ironic it may seem, their father’s city of birth, Brussels.
The story goes that on his deathbed, their father told each of them about one part of a map that leads to Barbarossa’s treasure. He then swallowed the map and died. This meant that only the 3 of them TOGETHER could find the mythical treasure.
The bad boys expect to see you at Alice Gallery to admire the works born from their fruitful union. They worked the old-school way, a bit like Disney from back in the days. The tall one traces the contours, the skinny one colours inside the lines and the little one is in charge of the framing. It’s a rare synergy in our time, but one that transpires a sense of both love and pain with every stroke of the crayon Triple Trouble is the unexpected reunion of three kids with big hearts.

– Triple Trouble –
A little about the artists
TRIPLE TROUBLE is the title of the new exhibition by the artists 2shy, Cream & So Me. It is hard to categorize these three fellows as they are as much illustrators, as they are Dj’s, graffiti artists, movie directors… They mix ‘genres’, supports, personal work and commercial work. If they are not yet recognized by the art institutions, it is because their line of work goes beyond those boundaries. If we think about the video clips that So Me realized for the French electro rock group JUSTICE or for the American rap singer Kanye West, viewed by millions on the internet alone, then we start to realize the importance of these hybrid artists on our culture.
Just like today’s banking system, the art world needs to re-think its values and references. Post modernity, that’s what it is!! No time for long speeches, what we need is Action! The art world has to come out of its secret garden and throw a new look at this globalized culture.
Or, is it the contrary? A globalized culture that this new generation of artists is trying to take over, just like the previous generation did with the previous one….
Whatever it may be, Triple Trouble is fresh, exciting and straight in your face.

Alice