-Awesome new works from Tyler Drosdeck-
Faded Paper
2007
Colored Paper and plaster
5 x 4 x 3 inches
Untitled 2
2007
Acrylic on canvas
17 1/4 inches diameter
Untitled 3
2007
Acrylic on canvas
17 1/4 inches diameter
Untitled 4
2007
Acrylic on canvas
17 1/4 inches diameter
Untitled (Marbles)
2007
Acrylic on wood panel
27 3/4 x 43 1/2 inches
Chris Johanson at Messezentrum Basel
[10. juli 2007]
Chris Johanson (b. 1968) organizes his colorful paintings in installations, where each painting connects with, and influences, the other. Working primarily with recycled materials, Johanson at the same time seems to be part of a major trend in the art world. For Johanson, though, this is not only a little fling with political correctness. Working with scavenged materials has been part of his artistic practice, since he began working as an artist. Represented various places at this years fair in Basel, and with a big painting installation at the Art Unlimited, the artist is a happy person: he has a mission, he would like to share with a broad audience.
Ai Weiwei (CN), Carl Andre (US), Kutlug Ataman (TR), Bluesoup Group (RU), Mel Bochner (US), Alighiero e Boetti (IT), Mathieu Briand (FR), Christoph Büchel (CH), Daniel Buren (FR), Alexander Calder (US), Cao Fei (CN), Bruce Conner (US), Sebastian Diaz Morales (AR), Omer Fast (IL), Claire Fontaine (FR), Carlos Garaicoa (CU), Katharina Grosse (DE), Kristjan Gudmunsson (IS), William Hunt (GB), Chris Johanson (US), San Keller (CH), Matts Leiderstam (SE), Ann Lislegaard, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer (MX), Marepe (BR), Allan McCollum (US), Tomas Saraceno, Superflex, Gert & Uwe Tobias (RO), Tatiana Trouvé (IT), Clare Woods (GB), a.o.
Chris Johanson: Untitled, 2007.
You present your paintings in a kind of installation – what is your idea behind that?
The point is, that everything is connected, and that is what I’m trying to show by presenting the paintings in this way. I’m pretty simple; I live a simple life, my brain is simple, and I like to make art that is pretty simple to understand – life is complex enough already. I like to present my information so I feel that anybody, whatever education they may have, can get involved into the art. I don’t want people to necessarily have an art degree to understand my work.
So it’s important for you, that your audience grasp your things?
Yes, it’s important that my art is understandable, on at least some levels, by the common person – and by all types of people…
You both work with abstract and figurative motives, can you explain why?
When you put some figures next to abstract, and you put all the paintings in a row, psychologically you can put the pieces together. For example the abstract, rectangular painting on the one side, has to do with society or systems of governments and socialization. But the one before that is totally abstract, it looks like after the Big Bang, when stardust made the planet. But before humans and animals came into the picture. It looks like a microcosm.
Chris Johanson: Untitled, 2007.
Do you see your paintings as belonging to one installation, or do you also see them separately?
I see them both ways, really. But I like it as a situation. I like the idea that this piece is going to be shown in a museum next year. That’s good to me, because that’s where I prefer to be seen.
So the museum is your favorite exhibition place?
Well, I would say books. I think books, public sculpture and museums are my favorite. Because it’s for more people. I like to do shows in galleries, but the dialogue is different.
You seem very concerned about the dialogue between your art works and your audience?
Absolutely, every time.
How can that relation be fruitful?
Because everything affects everything.
I also noticed that your work in itself reflects a kind of positive feeling – with the strong colors and so on – but then there also is this little dialogue balloon that says: ”We are the rulers”. What does that mean?
That’s about the stupidity of human nature. Because, it’s a bomber, you know. People are fighting all the time: we’re just like animals, but only more sophisticated, so in stead of running in to a bunch of elks and kill it if I were hungry, then because I’m a human I’m more likely to – if I get really irritated – grab a gun and kill a lot of people on a school, or nation to nation, race to race whatever… People are just fucked up!
Chris Johanson: Untitled, 2007.
But still you don’t make a dark and negative art?
No, not right now. But before I certainly did. But I want to be good in the world, and for the world. People have very different attitudes towards art, but this is really how I feel. I really think, that I have to be careful about what I put out in the world. My younger art was a lot more negative, because I was a lot more negative and reactionary. Now I’m mellower, but I know that you can use humor to get into people’s brains, and I want to get into people’s brains.
So do you feel, that you have a mission?
Yes, definitely. To be positive. And to make the world better, not worse. But because I’m a human being, then I am making the world worse. But I’m trying to be cool. I make art that is communicative, and when we make money from our art (Chris Johanson and his wife, red.), we give the money to different organizations, and we give art to art auctions, that are politically where we are. I also make political posters, and now I talk like this in an interview. I don’t know what else to do. I try to figure out more ways to be nice.
Do you as a painter have any references to art history?
Everything that has been made before is in my art. I didn’t go to a regular art school, but I went to a community college. I didn’t graduate from any school, but I took classes in sociology and psychology – I don’t remember a whole lot of it, but I know that’s inside my brain somewhere. Documentary filmmaking and photography, that’s my biggest inspiration, as far as art history goes. And reading…
You told me before about the nature element of your work. There seems to be quite a tendency right now in the art world, to be more concerned about recycling and the ecological systems?
I’m glad, that’s great! I’ve always done al my paintings on found wood, and I’ve always recycled, although there have been phases where I’ve been using new paper. But most of the time of being an artist, I’ve used found paper. I can use wood for one installation after the other, and then keep it. I get it out of the dumpsters, because I can’t create art on new wood, it makes me sick. If I went to a gallery or a museum, and I was supposed to have a show, and they wouldn’t give me recycled wood to work on, then I couldn’t do the show. I’m really in to it. I know it’s a control issue, but I get obsessive about it. That’s my kind of alchemy…. Seeing art that are made out of recycled materials, that has to get into people’s psyche, and if it’s like middleclass and rich people that see it, then it’s going into their lives and filter everything else. If everything that is negative affects people, then everything that is positive affects people. •
Very beautiful piece, made @ Roskilde 2007..
July 15th – 1st September 2007
Opening reception: Saturday, July 14, 2007, 6 ˆ 9 p.m.
Participating Artists:
Stella Capes | Tomas Chaffe | Gintaras Didıiapetris | Blue Firth | Alfred Johansen | Benoît Maire | Dan Rees / Catherine Griffiths | Mandla Reuter | Hannah Rickards | Yann Sérandour | Tris Vonna-Michell
Curated by Adam Carr
The Moment You Realise You Are Lost is an exhibition that presents the work of 12 international artists of whom are all unknown to a larger audience, particularly in Germany. One of the central aims of this exhibition resides in a desire to resuscitate and rejuvenate a vital objective behind the purpose of exhibition-making: to form a situation which above all fosters the opportunity for discovery. The work of the included artists, however, functions in contrast to ideas of location and detection by rather sharing an inherent desire to conceal these aspects through various means.
Despite being currently situated at an early stage in the development of their artistic positions, or relatively unexposed to a broad range of audiences, the participating artists share in common a rich, erudite and often densely complex articulation of their ideas. Characterised by an aspiration to position the viewer ambivalently yet never to alientate, the included artists focus on a particular performativity with which they seek to foreground the poetic, the fleeting and the unknown, and to be affirmatively suggestive rather than explicit. Their constellations of work embrace a fusion of fact and fiction, truth and false, and thus push for disorientation and an amplification of doubt. Opting to diverge from being entirely solved, found and uncovered instantaneously, these artists choose instead for their works to operate more covertly.
The Moment You Realise You Are Lost brings together artworks that will introduce a speculative inquiry yet offer very few entirely conclusive answers.Some of the included works are marked by traces of performances which have previously taken place, whilst others take on this strategy though wholly belie the precise course of actions that brought them into being; they appoint to disguise themselves within other works on display or recover ideas lost by others. Some works reveal interlaced histories or offer information unknown; they might partly operate outside of the exhibition space, even taking place beyond the scheduled dates of the exhibition. In addition, the installation, set-up, as well as the dissemination of the exhibition, will be premised on and interfered with by a number of the included works unexpectedly. In exploration of this exhibition, it seems like these artists like to entice the viewer for a walk in the dark, in some cases, quite literally.
Adam Carr is an independent curator and writer currently based in London.
For further information concerning the exhibition, please contact the gallery.
Johann König, Berlin
Dessauer Str. 6-7
10963 Berlin
Tel +49 30 26 10 30 80
Fax +49 30 26 10 30 8 11
info@johannkoenig.de
Dear friends, i am taking part in a groupshow of photo on the theme
of space overall, please come by for the opening..
best wishes Jakob Jensen
Einladung zur Ausstellungseröffnung
5_architektur + 13_fotografie im helberger 23 ausstellungsraum
am Samstag, 07.07.2007 ab 19:18 Uhr
Im Fokus des 2. Projekts im helberger 23 ausstellungsraum –
5_architektur und 13_fotografie – steht die Auseinandersetzung mit
verschiedenen Erscheinungsformen des Raumes und widmet sich dem
Medium Fotografie. Im Rahmen der beiden Ausstellungen zeigen in Form
von fotografischen Darstellungen, Inszenierungen, Dokumentationen und
Entwürfen 18 Fotokünstler und Architekten Arbeiten zu dieser
Thematik, die zum ersten Mal auf zwei Etagen des ehemaligen
Möbelhauses zu sehen sein werden. Die interdisziplinäre Arbeitweise
vieler der Beteiligten läßt dabei die Grenzen zwischen den beiden
Ausstellungen verschwinden.
Ganz im Sinne von Martin Heidegger “Räumen ist Freigabe von Orten”
führt räumen auch zur Entstehung von Bildern. So finden sich in der
Ausstellung einige Fotoserien, die in leeren und verlassenen Räumen
und Gebäuden entstanden sind – Zwischensituationen, sozusagen
Zwischenräume –, die in Zukunft eine neue Funktion bekommen, in Form
von Abriss durch neue ersetzt werden oder durch andere Umstände ganz
einfach geräumt werden mussten, wie man es beispielsweise in einer
Fotoserie von Cornelia Wruck (Frankfurt) sehen kann, die Aufnahmen in
einem leergeräumten Wohnhaus einer Verstorbenen gemacht hat.
Oliver Heissner (Hamburg) wird u.a. Arbeiten zeigen, die im
ehemaligen Gebäude der LVA Hamburg entstanden sind, das mittlerweile
abgerissen wurde, sowie Aufnahmen der Innenräume des “Sprinkenhof”,
ein altes Hamburger Kontorhaus, das nach seiner Sanierung für einige
Tage leerstand. Zum einen Fotografien von Räumen, denen man die
Verlassenheit ansieht, zum anderen Räume, die bald ein neues Gesicht
bekommen werden.
Neben seinen Sternbildern zeigt Jakob Jensen (Berlin) die Arbeit
“Superlandscape”: Das Foto bildet das Nylonnetz eines Baugerüstes ab
und mutet auf den ersten Blick doch wie eine Landschaft in Arizona an.
Ivaylo Stojanov (Mainz) sammelt in expressiven Farblichtern die
namenlose Natur, wobei sein Ziel nicht das Erkennen der Natur ist,
sondern der Blick auf ihre Wandlungen.
Nils Netzel (Wiesbaden), Architekt, zeigt Fotografien vom Alten
Finanzamt in Wiesbaden, die mit freundlicher Unterstützung von Prof.
Dr. Thilo Hilpert, Fachhochschule Wiesbaden zustande kamen. Die
Fotoserie beschäftigt sich mit dem brisanten Thema, wie das Land
Hessen mit den eigenen Kulturdenkmälern umgeht. Hilpert: „Das Gebäude
ist ein besonders feingliedriges und komplexes Beispiel für die frühe
Nachkriegs-Moderne in Deutschland – der beste Bau seiner Art in
Hessen.“ Dennoch würde das Land den Denkmalschutz aufheben und es so
der Abrissbirne preisgeben, um einen höheren Grundstückskaufpreis zu
erzielen.
Die Namen der weiteren Teilnehmer sowie die Daten zur Ausstellung
finden Sie unten.
5_architektur + 13_fotografie
Anette Babl (Frankfurt/Main)
Amalia Barboza (Frankfurt/Main) / Lorraine Decléty (München)
baukreis architekten (Frankfurt/Main) / Nils Netzel (Wiesbaden)
Jan Bleicher (Berlin)
Claude Cabri (Paris)
Ilka Götz (Stuttgart)
Oliver Heissner (Hamburg)
Jakob Jensen (Berlin)
Delia Keller (Berlin)
Stefan Mellmann (Stuttgart)
Anja Schlamann (Köln)
Constanze Schwürz (Leipzig)
Sabina Simons (Hamburg)
Ivaylo Stojanov (Mainz)
Gabrielle Strijewski (Frankfurt/Main)
Matthias Thelen (Berlin)
Michael Wagener (Frankfurt/Main)
Cornelia Wruck (Frankfurt/Main)
Eröffnung der Ausstellungen am Samstag, den 07.07.2007 um 19.18 Uhr
Ausstellungsdauer: 08.07. – 29.07.2007 | Öffnungszeiten: Do 18 – 21
und So 15 – 18 Uhr
Ort: helberger 23 ausstellungsraum, Große Friedberger Straße 23
(Hinterhaus), 60313 Frankfurt (Innenstadt)
Kuratoren:
Mia Beck: 49.151 56957422
Coco Hauschel: 49.177 3186539
Michael Wagener: 49.179 4923075
Internet:
Josephine Meckseper, U.S.A., 2007, 74,61 x 21,90 x 21,59 cm / 29.37 x 8.62 x 8.5 inch
The Kunstmuseum Stuttgart is honored to present the first extensive mid-career survey
of Josephine Mecksepers multimedia work. The exhibition will span four floors of the museum. It will be accompanied by a comprehensive catalogue, published by Hatje
Cantz Verlag, featuring essays by Okwui Enwezor and Christian Höller.
Josephine Meckseper was born in Germany and received her MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 1992. Meckseper is an internationally recognized artist, participating in such recent exhibitions as Resistance Is at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Second Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, Media Burn at Tate Modern, the Biennial of Contemporary Art of Seville, USA Today at the Royal Academy, traveling to the State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, and the Whitney Biennial 2006: Day for Night. She lives and works in New York.
… Josephine Meckseper’s artistic projects have stringently focused on addressing the
politics of power and violence that undergird the current global imperium. Using a wide array of methodologies: film, video, photography, painting, graphic and product design, installation, and architectural fragments, Meckseper has invented an amalgam of displaysurfaces – in reference to both Warhol’s pop ironies and to the rhetoric of negation at the heart of the work of artists as disparate as John Heartfield, Raymond Hains, Asger Jorn, David Hammons, Barbara Kruger, Jenny Holzer – as critical armatures for the interrogation of global geopolitics, protest, contestation, and empowerment. In her sculptures, paintings, films, photographs, collages, and posters, she draws a direct correlation to the way consumer culture defines and circumvents subjectivity, and as such sublimates the key instruments of individual political agency as part of the world of the commodity. Okwui Enwezor, 2007
OPENING RECEPTION
13 July from 7 – 10 p.m.
ADDRESS
KUNSTMUSEUM STUTTGART
Kleiner Schlossplatz 1
70173 Stuttgart
Tel.: +49 (0) 711 – 216 21 88
Fax: +49 (0) 711 – 216 78 20
info@kunstmuseum-stuttgart.de
I’m at Roskilde Festival….will be back tomorrow!
J-P
Dear J-P
I hope all is well, and you’re having a great summer.
I am doing a live performance at the ICA on Friday July 13 at 7 pm. It’s a
completely new show, and should be good for a laugh or two.
