Séverine Hubard*
Artists talk: April 15th 2007, 5 p.m.

Duration of the exhibition: March 15th — April 31st 2007

The exhibition “Von Welten und Werken” of the artists Nathalie Grenzhaeuser (born 1969, Stuttgart) and Séverine Hubard (born 1977, Lille) combines two contemporary positions which deal with landscapes and public space in different artistic media. The photographer Nathalie Grenzhaeuser shows the new series “Die Konstruktion der Stillen Welt / The construction of the silent world”, commenced during a two month trip on the arctic archipelago Spitzbergen. The installation, developed on-site, of the sculptor Séverine Hubard corresponds dialogically to the exhibition space and to the photographs of Nathalie Grenzhaeuser.

The artist Nathalie Grenzhaeuser deals with the perception of landscapes. Deserts, deserted industrial scenery, orphaned public spaces and landscapes are recurrent subjects with which the artist tries to fathom the relation between men and nature. The “emptiness” and apparent scantiness of this landscapes which give space for a dialogue between associativity and memory are constitutive Grenhaeuser’s work.On her travel the artist finds the basic material for her photographs.
Most of the time Grenzhaeuser photographs locations reminding of stage settings which are familiar through their incisive shape and charged symbolically through their history. Those are often fragile landscapes (the Arctic) grasped in a cultural historical flux.Even though the photographs appear to be realistic, they are no documentary images. The works are developed rather in a pictorial approach. Derived from photographic sketches, particular moments and parts of a landscape were woven together with digital editing or were freely invented. The place of origin is transformed in many steps and a new location of special quality is developing. Grenzhaeuser?s photographs show a world that is related to the real but that appears like a dream or a parallel world.The new series “Die Konstruktion der Stillen Welt” broaches the issue of the arctic landscape. The works refer to the history of coal mining, the change of the arctic landscape as well as their cultural-historical and emotional importance.
The sculptor Séverine Hubard became known through space-consuming installations and interventions in exhibition- and public space. In her exemplary, futuristic miniature cities the artist is dealing with existing architecture while at the same time she is referring to the surrounding public space. Hubard in her works broaches the issue of the artificial transformation of world through (constructional) interventions of men to nature which is hard neither to impede nor to reverse.The public space constructed by Séverine Hubard is not created for men. The clean white surfaces allow no admission. There is no “living space” for natural life-forms in Hubard?s world of modules. The hybrid constructions of Hubard seem quasiaesthetical through their geometrical, module-like skyline, but contain certain replications: the
“danger” to proliferate rampantly in the exhibition space and to absorb it. For her installations hubard uses discarded doors and windows, applies furniture, shelves, wooden plates and battens which she merges – in precisely constructed modules – to miniature cities. Through the geometrical arrangement of the different elements a tension is created
between order and chaos, demolition and construction.The artist integrates everyday found footage and non-artistic materials in her works, which seem quasi chaotic and quasi mathematical reminding of dadaistic works, for example Schwitter?s “Merzbau”.In the exhibition “Von Welten und Werken” the artist develops an installation in situ which is dealing with the alteration of the exhibition space and is thereby interacting with the photographs of

Nathalie Grenzhaeuser.

Tue – Fr 11 a.m. — 6 p.m.
Sa 11 a.m. — 2 p.m.
and by arrangement*

Messen / fairs:

CIRCA Puerto Rico 30.03.-02.04.2007
ART Chicago 27.04.- 30.04.2007
LOOP Barcelona 31.05.-02.06.2007

Galerie | Anita Beckers | Frankfurt

Frankenallee 74
D-60327 Frankfurt / Main

Tel (0)69-73 9009 67
Fax (0)69-73 9009 68
info@galerie-beckers.de

BECKERS

Jack Hanley Gallery is pleased to announce the first US solo exhibition of the work of Michael Bauer: Basho’s Friends. Born in Erkelenz, Denmark in 1973, Bauer studied at the Academy of Fine Arts Braunschweig, and in 2002, co-founded the exhibition space BROTHERSLASHER Cologne with Tim Berresheim. Bauer’s paintings appear both intuitively spontaneous and carefully contrived, where haphazard forms emerge with playful sophistication, balancing between organic aberration and whimsical design.

For his debut in San Francisco, Bauer will present a series of paintings reminiscent of the bizarre anthropomorphic portraits of 16th century painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo, where figurative composites are suggested through abstraction and design. Seemingly impulsive drips and washes are arranged in an innate manner to create grotesque and distorted bodily forms. Bauer uses the qualities of abstract painting to deviate from the classical standards of representational portraiture, and consequently offers deformity as a platform for indisputable beauty.

Michael Bauer has had solo exhibits at Hotel in London, and Galerie Hammelehle and Ahrens in Cologne. Bauer’s work has also been included in the exhibitions Figure-Five Position at Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich, Michael Bauer and Steffie Popp at Cokkie Snoei Gallery, Rotterdam, and at Marc Foxx Gallery, Los Angeles. Bauer currently lives and works in Cologne.

Jack Hanley

DETAIL of The Lay of the Land, 2007
ink on mylay.

My Fellow Americans, 2007
video still

My Fellow Americans, 2007
video still

MICHAEL WAUGH
Lead Me Astray

February 16 – March 17, 2007

Schroeder Romero Gallery is pleased to announce Lead Me Astray, by Michael Waugh, which will include large-scale drawings, video, performance documentation, original texts, and archived materials. This is his second solo exhibition with the gallery.

Waugh’s large-scale drawings are composed of thousands of miniscule words written out by the artist, with the text condensing into vast, romanticized landscapes, rife with political and religious allegory. One suite of these drawings utilizes every US presidential inaugural speech, chopped-up and re-written by the artist to subvert their rhetoric – then rendered virtually unreadable by these obsessive drawings. The speeches written for these drawings are also used in Waugh’s video, entitled My Fellow Americans. In this video, a wide range of people play the role of president, delivering dead-pan renditions of Waugh’s speeches, revealing how authority can be conveyed even when the actual message lacks logical cohesion.

The newest piece in the show will respond to a different set of texts and another form of authoritative rhetoric: the academic papers being delivered at the College Art Association’s annual conference, which opens on February 14th. And a final piece in Waugh’s show consists of an archive of art fair materials collected by the artist this past December in Miami. Waugh will present those texts unaltered along side another of his text-drawings, this one of Cabeza de Vaca, who began the first long-term exploration of what would eventually be the southern United States after being shipwrecked in Florida.

What emerges from this diverse body of work is an exploration of how history is made, how the vast stores of original documentation created every day collapse into one another as we try to make sense of and connect with the past – a task made all the more difficult as each of us tries to find our own meaning behind events, while we try endlessly to see ourselves reflected in history.

Waugh’s first solo exhibition, Inaugural-2005, comprised of text-based drawings and watercolors, coincided with George W. Bush’s second inauguration. The show received reviews from The New York Times and Art in America. Waugh has been included in the recent group exhibitions, The Nightly News, curated by Kathleen Goncharov at Luxe Gallery, New York (open through February 18) and Text Formed Drawing, curated by Barry Rosenberg at the Contemporary Art Galleries at the University of Connecticut. Waugh holds degrees in Creative Writing from Southwest Texas State University and in Visual Art from New York University.

Schroeder Romero

Erik have the best works @ Faurschou.
Opening to night.

Faurschou

Johannes Wohnseifer
Recent Sex / Love Works

To day Friday, March 9, 2007 from 6 to 9 p.m.

Johann König, Berlin
Dessauer Str. 6-7
10963 Berlin

Johann Koenig

It was in Alma-Ata (now Almaty in Kazakhstan) where Almagul Menlibaeva began her career as a painter, occasionally using felt as a resource. Though felt, a material par excellence in nomadic cultures, can never be limited to any ordinary medium. Being traditionally crafted by women, it unleashes a lyrical sensibility and dramatic tension in this Kazakh artist.

In the video that marks her artistic maturity, it is obvious where Almagul’s imagination finds its power, which could not have been anywhere other than the steppe. As a place of visual minimalism par excellence with its flat configuration, deprived of any vertical presence, it becomes a ‘Baroque Steppe’ when fired by her wild imagination. Inhabited by ‘Snow-Women’ or women as old as the world, it emerges as a magic space depicting an eternal symmetry of eroticism. Almagul’s works are fairy tales besieged by history in action, and even her most realistic video, set in a labyrinthic and rainy Alma-Ata, portrays the ultimate female fairytale archetype, the bride; essentially still a virgin escaping the violations which, from Duchamp onwards, she has been subject to.

Baroque and symmetrical, Almagul’s visual world was established in the wake of the crisis and later the collapse of the ‘East-Soviet Empire’ (1991). In an era of overwhelming changes, it regains both modernity and its ancestral origins. The characteristic naked body at the core of her work challenges the formalism belonging to a long history of Soviet art. Beauty and violence are continuously aestheticizing one another. However, the process is paradoxically ideological in the sense that it appropriates values such as the avant-garde and shamanism, which were forbidden in the Soviet era and are still very unfavourable to the new regimes in Central Asia. This young Kazakh artist makes such values pulsate with life through an unrestrained vitality that constantly clashes with the reality of a post-Soviet disaster. In a recent work (the video ‘On the Road’) the steppe is burning around a Sufi-shaman artist; an old, naked and unkempt man, who is in reality the artist Moldakul, a protagonist in the Kizil Traktor Group; the first post-Soviet avant-garde in the Golden Horde (1994). Alongside the man, two young, also naked, women dance and embrace each other, while the landscape is so extremely rectilinear and torrid that escape appears impossible.

In an earlier video-cycle of photographs entitled ‘Wagon’, the recurrent theme of naked bodies is set between the geometric power of an iron carcass that was once a railway carriage and a vast and imminent steppe. Almagul instils drama in the relationship between an eternal steppe and the ruins of a Soviet iron age, which seem more archaic than cities like Sairam, distroyed from Mongols in XIII century and whittled away by the wind.

In the ‘Baroque Steppe’ trilogy, which afforded her international attention, she plays with refractions and symmetries portrayed against the backdrop of an Islamic cemetery, as captivating as a fairytale castle. Dionysius and Apollo, primal chaos and pure formal organization, here meet in an absolute realm on the Central Asian steppe.

In an ideological return to her origins, Almagul seems intent on overcoming that Islamism which never made much headway among the nomadic peoples of Central Asia, or at best wants to seize it in – as Valeria Ibraeva describes referring to the best Kazakh art – ‘a wild and deviant Sufi figure’. Yet in front of the great mausoleum of Saint (Khodja) Yasawi in Turkestan (a masterpiece of Timurid architecture), the artist looks beautiful and elegant in a multicoloured Ikat; above all she covers herself and aims a non-reconciliatory look. The title of this work is ‘Jihad’.

Davidegallo

Monique Meloche is pleased to announce Kalup Linzy’s first solo show in Chicago!
Kalup Linzy
Conversations wit de Churen
March 16 – April 21, 2007
video still from Conversations wit de Churen III: Da Young and Da Mess, 2005
opening reception for the artist Friday March 16th 6-9pm

www.moniquemeloche.com

“Kalup Linzy’s clever and unique voice lampoons and satirizes various forms of film & television such as Hollywood tearjerkers and soap operas. He deals with highly charged themes such as gender, sexuality, race, class, and popular culture. His takes on these issues are eloquently fused into his delightfully raunchy videos and performances like Conversations Wit De Churen and Diva in Distress. Multi-tasking as a writer, director, actor, and editor, his film approach recalls the early styles of John Waters, Andy Warhol, and George C. Wolfe. Using multi-layered characters and subplots that weave through the works, he constructs powerful critiques of the laws of romance and desire, family and trust, truth and hypocrisy. He manages to go for the jugular with uproarious humor, while at the same time his keen sense of truth is unwaveringly present. We the viewers are forced to confront the ways we deal with our own yearnings and acknowledge the dirty little secrets that everyone knows.” Whitfield Lovell, visual artist

For his exhibition at moniquemeloche Linzy will feature Conversations wit de Churen — a multi-part video project that began in 2003. Linzy, along with a cast of friends of various ethnic backgrounds, don over-the-top drag costumes and perform an “…endless parodic relay that disrupts conventional categories of gender, sexuality, and race.” Debra Singer Artforum Jan. 2007 The exhibition will open with the most recent installment As da art world might turn (2006) projected in the main space of the gallery alongside a series of drawings made by Linzy’s alter-ego Katonya. There will be a weekly rotation of the videos (changing each Saturday) so that the entire project can be seen in succession. The video schedule is as follows:

Mar 16-23 V: As da Art World Might Turn 2006
Mar 24-30 II: All my Churen 2003
Mar 31-Apr6 III: Da Young and da Mess 2005
Apr 7-13 IV: Play wit de Churen 2005
Apr 14-21 V: As da Art world Might Turn 2006

Kalup Linzy (b. 1977 Florida, lives NY) received both his MFA and BFA from the University of South Florida (2003/2000) and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2002). His first major solo show at Taxter & Spengemann Gallery in NY last fall received rave reviews, including a best of 2006 nod Artforum. His work will be included in the Moscow Biennial 2007 “Uncertain States of America – American Video Art in the 3rd Millennium.” In 2006 alone, his live performance were featured at Art Basel Miami, KunstFilm Biennial Art Cologne, PS1 Contemporary Art Center NY, Center for Contemporary Art Glasgow, and The Studio Museum in Harlem. Linzy was the recipient of a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Grant in 2005 and was just awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for 2007-2008. Linzy will be speaking at The School of The Art Institute of Chicago as part of their Visiting Artist Program on Wednesday, March 28th www.saic.edu/vap.

Monique Meloche

Crazy Danish Girls.

Ingen Frygt

Opening friday 9 March.
This is the first Day of My Life

Malmø Kunsthall