Month: April 2009

Compound Editions presents Rory Donaldson


Compound Editions is very pleased to announce the release of our third multiple, SQVENICEWATER08, by New York-based Scottish artist Rory Donaldson. Blending the languages of painting and photography, Donaldson creates stunning C-print images through a digital process that stretches out the original photograph’s four corners. The central image of each piece is identifiable only upon close inspection (see detail of SQVENICEWATER08 below). What greets the viewer from a distance looks to be large blocks of solid color, referencing perhaps color-field painting. As art critic John Haber recently put it:

“[Donaldson’s photographs] put color-field painting through its paces. Each divides neatly into four rectangles, in unnervingly close or contrasting colors. For a second, I mistook them for separate acrylic panels, but the effect is more striking once one engages them as photographs. Forget Ad Reinhardt, Clement Greenberg, and pure painting, they seem to boast, with just a bit of arrogance. This is what a new century’s technology can do.”

—John Haber, haberarts.com, May 27, 2008

Schroeder Romero

Tal R – You laugh an ugly laughter at Kunsthalle zu Kiel


Tal R has developed an artistic strategy to recycle the meaningless and the obvious – the remains, what is left behind in the art world. The artist himself, who was born in Tel Aviv in 1967, refers to his works as ‘Kolbojnik’ – as the waste bin is called in a Kibbutz. For each new project, Tal R uses a different technique – collage, photography, drawing, sculpture – returning again and again to painting, his favourite medium. All the while, his fascination with the recalcitrant material is controlled by a rigorous composition. Consisting of elements of the underground (comic strips, graffiti, music), the naive, self-confident subjects materialise in colourful, exploding objects with geometrical interiors. In a comprehensive retrospective, the Kunsthalle zu Kiel shows the Danish artist amidst baroque halo, undertow and explosion, comic strips, furniture, erupting volcanos and geishas.

A feeling for form, color-signals, irony, humor and a rich vocabulary of remakeaspects is combined in Tal R’s oeuvre with the conceptual strictness of a lyrical form which is freshly selected for each new work. Just as with poems, one can approach his works through the distinction between form, meter and contents. Form should be conceived, not as the external contour of a picture or a sculpture, but as the manner in which the composition assumes its outward appearance. Tal R develops his sequences of pictures, series of sketches or groups of objects in an almost scientific investigation, and on the basis of a certain spectrum of material and color. The individual works are connected through the same outer dimensions or inner visual structure. Examples could be furnished by the group of pictures in the exhibition The Sum (2007/2008) at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, or by the radial pictures of the series Adieu Interessant (2005 – 2008), as well as the drawings, box- and frame-objects. Sometimes the artist produces entire blocks of works with an eye to certain exhibition situations, and sometimes his work arises independently of them. In order to do justice to the rich diversity of his oeuvre, the Kunsthalle zu Kiel, in cooperation with the Kunsthalle Tübingen, is presenting for the first time works of Tal R from various phases and projects.

Tal R’s circumspect navigation in the exhibition context – his effort to expand his art onto everyday surroundings, to keep borders flowing, and to show the constructed nature of things – also defines the structure of his oeuvre itself. One aspect of this is the cubist organization of the surfaces of many of his pictures. Furthermore, the central level of the picture is surrounded by vignette-shaped framings, as if the picture were a playing field which has room for four players on each of its four sides. In a decorative sense, the ornaments in the side-bands convey the pictorial motifs to the external world. Objects culminate in the chaotic juxtaposition of bizarrely crooked and subtly varied pictorial fields. Alongside the reference to Cubism and a graffiti-like manner of painting which recalls the American painter Jean-Michel Basquiat, stylistic diversity and self-referentiality triumph over content in Tal R’s pictures. They are cubist, two-dimensional, painted in a patchy, airy or grained manner, sometimes blurred, sometimes appearing as a woodcut-like form, as papier collé or a material picture in relief, painted over or sprayed in one color, so that the viewer knows neither whether he is standing opposite a picture or an object, nor what is art and what is its frame.

Kunsthalle Kiel

Cindy Sherman


Sprüth Magers London is delighted to present Cindy Sherman’s first UK exhibition since 2007. The colour photographs assembled are selected from a new series which develops 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 who 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 #466, 2008) the elegant and leisured affectation of a society dame poised in her cloistered manor is subtly undermined by the detail of Sherman’s performance; the stockinged feet wedged in to cheap plastic shoes do not speak of the same pride or superiority as her character’s haughty glare.

In another work from the series, a woman distinguished by the shimmering and infernal scarlet tones of her dress, lipstick and whites of her eyes stares out boldly, almost intrusively, at the viewer. Similarly installed against an aristocratic backdrop, the fearsome and ugly figure of Untitled #470 exemplifies the ambivalent amalgam of fragility, defiance and faded glamour which animates the scenes and personas created by Sherman in this new body of work. It is ultimately impossible to fix any stable narrative in these works; different levels of pretence and authenticity operate and interact to complicate any straightforward reading of Sherman’s 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, and MoMA in New York in 1997. She was also the subject of an important retrospective in 2006 which travelled from the Jeu de Paume in Paris, to the Kunsthaus in Bregenz, Austria, the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk, Denmark, and Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin. 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. Her new body of work has been exhibited at Metro Pictures in New York and Sprüth Magers Berlin, before coming to London. Cindy Sherman lives and works in New York.

Spruethmagers