Gavin Brown's enterprise

Opening weekend: October 4–6, 2013
Curated by Daniel Baumann, Dan Byers, Tina Kukielski
Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh

Pittsburgh, PA...Opening with a weekend of special events and celebrations October 4–6, 2013, the 2013 Carnegie International is an ambitious return for Carnegie Museum of Art’s signature survey series, the preeminent exhibition of new international art in the United States.

The 2013 Carnegie International presents new voices rooted in history, a sense of place, and play. The exhibition is guided by a shared passion for the individual and the exceptional; for art that celebrates dissonance and beauty; and for artworks that stay in touch with the everyday.

Curated by Daniel Baumann, Dan Byers, and Tina Kukielski, the 2013 Carnegie International is a conversation among four parts: a major exhibition of new international art, a playground, the museum’s collection, and an engagement with the city of Pittsburgh.

Exhibition of New International Art
The 2013 Carnegie International brings together 35 artists from 19 countries, including a series of large-scale new commissions. The artists are Ei Arakawa/Henning Bohl, Phyllida Barlow, Yael Bartana, Sadie Benning, Bidoun Library, Nicole Eisenman, Lara Favaretto, Vincent Fecteau, Rodney Graham, Guo Fengyi, Wade Guyton, Rokni Haerizadeh, He An, Amar Kanwar, Dinh Q. Lê, Mark Leckey, Pierre Leguillon, Sarah Lucas, Tobias Madison, Zanele Muholi, Paulina Olowska, Pedro Reyes, Kamran Shirdel, Gabriel Sierra, Taryn Simon, Frances Stark, Joel Sternfeld, Mladen Stilinović, Zoe Strauss, Henry Taylor, Tezuka Architects, Transformazium, Erika Verzutti, and Joseph Yoakum.


The 2013 Carnegie International presents a broad spectrum of artworks, attitudes, and voices. It exposes powerful reinterpretations of the figure as a site of resistance, emancipation, and healing. It confronts everyday existence in all its beauty, imperfection, and confusion. It elucidates how abstraction can be employed as a tool to engage with the world. It makes a claim for the importance of place and reads history against the grain, paying homage to the multiplicities and dissonances that make our world richer and the future more interesting.

Despite social media, the Internet, and our global information economy, it still makes a difference if you live in Tehran, a village near Kraków, Johannesburg, or Los Angeles. Yet all of the artists in the exhibition, while working from and within a local context, translate their views into pictures, sculptures, concepts, or installations that can be understood by a broad audience.

On the one hand playful and experiential, the exhibition also takes a serious look at our contemporary world. A massive sculpture takes over public space to transform the museum entrance; a comprehensive photographic investigation dissects the culture of James Bond; and musical instruments made from former weapons play wondrous sounds. History is a constant subject for artists in the 2013 Carnegie International, from little-known episodes such as legendary potter George E. Ohr’s program of self-promotion to overlooked art forms like puppetry to powerful recollections of the Vietnam War told from an unexpected perspective. A photographic catalogue of utopian communities celebrates the successes and failures of American idealism. Large-scale immersive transformations of space include a major architectural intervention in the museum’s distinguished Hall of Architecture, a library of a thousand books transported into the museum’s Hall of Sculpture, and the remodeling of the Café as a cabaret. And Pittsburgh finds its way in through hundreds of portraits taken on the streets of Homestead, a former steel town, and through a neighborhood-based art lending collection in the historic Braddock Carnegie Library.

The 2013 Carnegie International is a multidimensional enterprise that celebrates the role of art in our lives. Its centrality is further investigated and enhanced by two other exhibitions hosted within the International: The Playground Project and the reinstallation the museum’s permanent collection of modern and contemporary art.


The Collection
An ambitious reinstallation of Carnegie Museum of Art’s important collection of modern and contemporary art, led by Dan Byers and Tina Kukielski, showcases more than 200 artworks. By highlighting works collected through past Carnegie Internationals, along with other strengths and particularities of the collection, the 2013 Carnegie International enters into conversation with past iterations, larger art movements, and the unique relationship between an ephemeral exhibition and the building of a museum collection. It joins a 2012 reinstallation of the museum's 19th- and early 20th-century collection, which also draws attention to important International acquisitions. In 1896, Andrew Carnegie founded the International as a way for his fledgling museum to build its collection, and it remains a priority in 2013 to acquire works by artists in the exhibition.

Highlights of the reinstallation include works by American figures prominent in early Carnegie Internationals, including so-called self-taught artist and Pittsburgher John Kane, the visionary painter Charles Burchfield, and American modernist Marsden Hartley. Classic black-and-white photography from the 1930s to the 1960s showcases a collection strength that emerged alongside the International. A rich selection of post-Minimalism includes recently acquired works by Lynda Benglis, Paul Thek, and Franz Erhard Walther. The 1980s get special attention, as the International increased its scope and ambition during those years. Major works by German and New York painters share space with Stephanie Beroes’s post-punk filmic journey through Pittsburgh in 1980, Debt Begins at Twenty. Major installations by Karen Kilimnik, Rikrit Tiravanija, Cathy Wilkes, and Haegue Yang anchor the 1990-2000s galleries.

Drawing on Carnegie Museum of Art’s rich and important film collection, assistant curator Amanda Donnan has organized a film series on view in the collection galleries featuring a rotating schedule of works by Stan Brakhage, Robert Breer, Bruce Conner, Hollis Frampton, Owen Land, George Kuchar, Robert Nelson, Paul Sharits, and others. The Carnegie’s film program was among the first of its kind in an American museum when it was established in 1970.

An archival display devoted to the history of the International includes artworks, primary documents, installation photography and video documentation, highlighting, among other moments, the 1958 jury featuring Marcel Duchamp and Vincent Price, James Lee Byars’s legendary 1965 performance with Lucinda Childs, and David Smith’s famous refusal of a third-place prize.

Engagement with the City of Pittsburgh
Even as the 2013 Carnegie International brings the far reaches of the world to Pittsburgh, it remains firmly rooted in the city. At the Carnegie International apartment in the city’s Lawrenceville neighborhood, artists, curators, writers, and the interested public gathered throughout the last two years to discuss some of the ideas shaping the exhibition and broader culture. Over the course of 50 events, the apartment has functioned as a meeting place for Pittsburgh’s cultural community, and has hosted artists visiting the city. This engagement with the city of Pittsburgh is also taking shape through art projects outside the museum walls, with an art lending collection at the Braddock Carnegie Library initiated by artist group Transformazium, and Zoe Strauss’s Homestead portrait studio.


Carnegie Museum of Art
Carnegie Museum of Art, founded by industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie in 1895, is nationally and internationally recognized for its collection of fine and decorative art from the 19th to 21st centuries. The collection also contains important holdings of Japanese and old master prints. Founded in 1896, the Carnegie International is one of the longest-running surveys of contemporary art worldwide. The Heinz Architectural Center, part of Carnegie Museum of Art, is dedicated to enhancing understanding of the built environment through its exhibitions, collections, and public programs. The Hillman Photography Initiative serves as a living laboratory for exploring the rapidly changing field of photography. For more information about Carnegie Museum of Art, one of the four Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh, call 412.622.3131 or visit our website at www.cmoa.org

Martin Creed
Scales
September 22, 2013, to March 9, 2014

The multifarious activities of Martin Creed—visual artist, composer, musician, performer, and choreographer—are contextualized as artworks, yet he resists that definition; rather, he catalogues his output by a simple taxonomy: a number followed by a descriptive title. Since the initial Work No. 3, Yellow painting (1996), the intervening seventeen years have seen the accumulation of nearly two thousand works, including Work No. 1652 (2013), a Victorian-era upright piano whose lid mechanically opens and then drops closed. The abrupt, loud slam causes the simultaneous resonance of every key, an atonal drone that slowly fades until the movement repeats. What might be considered music in this work is as much tied to the object's inherent qualities as to an incremental, relative, and nimble exercise in classification.

Michelangelo, master of the High Renaissance and progenitor of the multi-hyphenate, is supposed to have said that the sculpture was inside the marble and it was just a matter of finding it. Creed often refers to this anecdote as "a nice way to think about working—finding it, not making it." Scales assumes this exploratory methodology, finding music both sonorously and conceptually in the most obvious and least likely of things and ways, in works in paint, ink, sculpture, and video.

This exhibition is bound together by the artist's consistently applied methodology; a penchant for deconstruction and automation which yields work as much about music as all forms of creative expression. A scientifically rigorous approach characterizes Creed's process, wherein parameters are gathered, data is compartmentalized, and the object of his inquiry is subjected to a simple variable, to observe how something seemingly so minor might generate such major effects. Unexpectedly complex expressions are drawn from breaking things down by units and measures, allowing new subtexts about happiness, love, relationships, anxiety, fear, failure, relief, and death to emerge. Consider these works amongst Creed's on-going experiments, which might illuminate some things we don't know while helping us to enjoy the process of finding out.

Martin Creed lives and works in London, England and Alcudi, Italy.

Kelly Taxter, curator

  All-in-One
29 NOVEMBER 2013 - 23 FEBRUARY 2014
All-in-One is the first major survey exhibition of German artist Thomas Bayrle, a pioneer of Pop, seriality and Media Art. In the mid 1960s Bayrle began making work based on the serial repetition of the same pattern using formal compositions indebted to the seriality of the then-emerging Minimal Art movement. He invented a unique visual language through the production of collages, paintings, sculptures, films and books. Bayrle’s work has always retained a critical engagement. His interest in mass culture and his incorporation, in the midst of the Cold War, of the symbols of capitalist and communist societies on either side of the Wall pervades his oeuvre.

This exhibition, organised by WIELS Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels, spans the artist’s entire career, from his first painted kinetic machines to his most recent engine installations. Rather than arranging the work chronologically, the exhibition brings together the various, and sometimes contradictory, themes that run through the artist’s work, including consumerism and consumer society, political propaganda, sexuality and religion.

Thomas Bayrle, All in One. Organised by WIELS, Brussels, in collaboration with BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Museo MADRE, Napoli and IAC — Institut d'art contemporain — Villeurbanne/Rhône-Alpes. Curated by Devrim Bayar

DARA FRIEDMAN
January 11 – February 22, 2014


In PLAY, (Part 1&2), 2013, 17 couples—some real-life couples, others paired by the artist, all of them actors—develop and play out scenes of intimacy. The poetic, intense, and humorous situations grow intuitively from a process of improvisational theater games created for the purpose.

With this new work, Friedman engages with actors and their ability to receive and transmit projected desires, while at the same time laying bare theatrical and cinematic devices with Brechtian pleasure. Created during Friedman’s residency at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, PLAY was filmed at the museum’s Billy Wilder Theater, in a hippie shack in Topanga Canyon, and on the streets of Los Angeles.

PLAY marks an important climax in Friedman’s recent work, completing a trilogy of works with Musical (2007-8) and Dancer (2011). In Musical, singers catch us unaware in the street of New York, giving voice to their thoughts, while the city of Miami sets the stage for Dancer. Together the films show us a rhythm of life—showmanship and humility, aggression and tenderness, poise and wildness, all in equal measure.

PLAY is shot on Super 8 and high definition video in Color and black & white.
Part 1 : 30 minutes
Part 2 : 15 minutes

Born in 1968 in Bad Kreuznach, Germany, Dara Friedman now lives and works in Miami. Her work has been featured in solo exhibitions at Gavin Brown’s enterprise, New York (2011, 2007, 2002); The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2013); Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw, Poland (2013); The Kitchen, New York (2005); Kunstmuseum, Thun, Switzerland (2002); Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2002). The trilogy of works will be presented at MOCAD, Detroit in May 2014.

Friedman attended University of Miami, School of Motion Pictures (MFA); The Slade School of Fine Art, University College, London; Städelschule, Frankfurt am Main, Germany; and Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York.

PLAY was created during a residency at the Hammer Museum. The Hammer Museum’s Artist Residency Program was initiated with funding from the Nimoy Foundation and is supported through a generous grant from The James Irvine Foundation.

As its NUMBER SEVEN show, JULIA STOSCHEK COLLECTION is presenting two artists in a dual exhibition: British artist Ed Atkins and US-american artist Frances Stark.

In their multi-disciplinary approaches, Ed Atkins and Frances Stark reflect the change in how artists define forms and the discourse of representation in the world of media images. The work of both artists, each of whom is also active in literature, is characterized by an exploration of the various interactions between image and text. By means of state-of-the-art computer technology they weave a complex fabric of signs, text fragments and autobiographical references that then enter their visual pieces as hypertext. The exhibition will focus on video installations, with collages, conceptual wall pieces and sculptural objects rounding out the selection.

The exhibition concept centers on sequences of individual rooms to broach a dialog between the two artists. The configuration of works highlights the transformation of the classical moving image into digital image production processing. The JULIA STOSCHEK COLLECTION is thus reiterating its emphasis on presenting contemporary time-based media.

High definition image technologies form the basis of Ed Atkins’ artistic practice. He primarily explores the one-sided focus on technical perfection in image quality as opposed to the fact that the media formats can no longer be grasped haptically. Given the consequent de-corporealization, in his installations Atkins seeks to develop an aesthetic of disappearance, taking as his leitmotifs illness and death.

For her art projects, Frances Stark relies on a self-created and multifaceted system of references that above all stem from questioning the notion of authorship and her own artistic creative process. Her work cuts across genres and expresses a tussle with words and their meaning. Short quotes, music, literature, pop culture, autobiographical notes and events all serve as the basis for her video installations, performances, sculptures and works on paper.

Duration
7 September, 2013 – February 2014 


Opening hours
every Saturday, 11 a.m. – 6 p.m.

Guided tours
For guided tours in German or English, special guided tours and guided tours outside regular opening hours please visit our website.

Artist Talk
On Saturday, 7 September, 2013, 5 p.m. the JULIA STOSCHEK COLLECTION will host an artist talk between Ed Atkins and Frances Stark moderated by Klaus Biesenbach, director of MoMA PS 1 and Chief Curator at Large, MoMA, New York. Entrance is free of charge!

Film Programme

From September 2013 onwards, the accompanying STUDIO 54 film programme will start again, with films selected by Frances Stark and Ed Atkins will take place every second Wednesday in the month. The first date is Wednesday, 11 September, 2013, 7:30 p.m.; entrance is free of charge!

Wednesday – Sunday
11 AM – 6 PM
 
 
 

Through a multi-disciplinary practice that encompasses sculpture, sound, film, and performance, British artist Mark Leckey explores the potential of the human imagination to appropriate and to animate a concept, an object, or an environment. Drawing on his personal experiences as a London-based artist, who spent his formative years in the north of England, Leckey returns frequently to ideas of personal history, desire and transformation in his work.

On Pleasure Bent is a new body of work in which Leckey attempts to form a kaleidoscopic memoir, assembling his past from the imagery that he believes conditioned him. The exhibition will include all new works, several being exhibited publicly for the first time. Objects will include LED screens featuring looped animations, animated screens made up of highly-magnified computer screens silk screened with images, as well as cinema lobby style 'standees' and a trailer for a new video.

Organized by Ali Subotnick, curator, with Emily Gonzalez, curatorial assistant.

Alex Katz Interview MOCA TV

Chisenhale Gallery presents a solo exhibition by London born, New York based, artist Nick Relph who works across video, drawing and installation. This commission of an entirely new body of work will be Relph’s first major solo exhibition in a public institution following his ten-year collaboration with Oliver Payne (1999-2009).

Tomorrow There is No Recording examines handicraft, materials and ideas of value and exchange, and the relationship of industrial processes to contemporary economic models. Using a four-harness floor loom, Relph has fabricated a series of small weaves using materials including polyester, rayon, silk, monofilament, latex and paper. The weaves are presented at Chisenhale as part of a specially conceived installation.

Relph’s interest in handmade, woven textiles stems from an appreciation of the labour involved in their production, in addition to the particular formal and material resonance of these constructed fabrics within our digitally-oriented culture. Woven surfaces can be read as images, whilst also retaining the information of their making – mistakes and irregularities or impressions from the loom – and the signs of wear that emerge over time and through use. This preoccupation with the relationship between image and surface emerges from Relph’s previous film and video work. He has said: ‘I can’t think about moving image now without thinking about this surface upon which it’s being viewed’.

Relph first began to explore his interest in the material and social effects of textiles through moving image. Thre Stryppis Quhite Upon ane Blak Field (2010) – presented at the Venice Biennial 2011 and currently on display at Tate St Ives – connects the meandering history of tartan with the Japanese fashion label Comme des Garçons and the artist Ellsworth Kelly. Here, Relph employs a trilogy of colour – red, blue and green – as a visual motif and conceptual device to weave associations between subject matter in the film. The history of colour reproduction, manufacture and consumption are further explored through the presentation of the film as a composite RGB projection, which recalls the mechanical print processes used in the textile industry.

Relph’s contemporary methodology of accumulating, cutting and pasting, and manipulating research material, as a source of both information and inspiration, is juxtaposed with materials and processes that are idiosyncratic and often home spun. The links Relph makes are tentative, suggesting something elliptical at play in the manufacture and circulation of goods, and, in turn, influencing our subjective attachment to them.


Nick Relph (born 1979, London) lives and works in New York. Recent solo exhibitions include Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York (2012); Standard, Oslo (2011); Herald Street, London (2010) and Frieze Foundation Commission, Frieze Art Fair (2010). Recent group exhibitions include Summer 2013, Tate St Ives (2013), How To Look At Everything, Common Guild, Glasgow (2012); Modify as Needed, Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami (2011). Relph was a participating artist in ILLUMInations, the 54th Venice Biennale (2011).

Nick Relph’s exhibition is supported by The Henry Moore Foundation, Shane Akeroyd and Andrew Hale.
Chisenhale Exhibitions Partner 2013: Fiorucci Art Trust.

Those intrepid heroes, how are they treated,
Those who wade out into battle?
Wolf-skinned they are called. In battle
They bear bloody shields.
Red with blood are their spears when they come to fight.
– Thórbiörn Hornklofi, 9th century

Gavin Brown's enterprise is pleased to present Ignorant Transparencies, the gallery’s first solo exhibition with Norwegian artist Bjarne Melgaard.

Melgaard cannot stop. He is the most prodigiously compulsive, excessively promiscuous exhibitor working today. In the past 24 months alone he has staged 7 exhibitions – at Maccarone (2011; After Shelley Duvall '72), Ramiken Crucible (2012; Ideal Pole; baby tigers), ICA, London (2012; A House to Die In; with Snøhetta), Luxembourg & Dayan, NY (2012/13; A New Novel; doll houses and Proenza Schouler), Venus Over Manhattan, NY (2013; Gang
Bust; black W. Copley, black Allen Jones, Big Fat Black Cock, Inc.), Rod Bianco, NY (2013; Mary Boone paintings), and White Columns, NY (2013; Sverre Bjertnæs, including an incredible 'interview' on film). His oppressively constant creation becomes instantaneous, lionhearted fulfillment, no matter how amoral or antisocial the art. Questions of taste and quality become slippery and messy, in an all-out irrational, anti-narrative pathos.

Like his Pepto-Bismol-hued alter ego, the Pink Panther (a perfect embodiment of the Norwegian's ongoing berzerking of aesthetic cancellation), Melgaard is simultaneously the fearsome predator and also the uncool loser – don't forget that relentless erzatz-jazz theme tune to accompany this vision of the horrifying loneliness of our existence.

In a startling and depressing downward spiritual development, we have moved from William Blake's encounter with cosmic fearful symmetry – our original, earliest other – to Bjarne Melgaard (in his words a “45-year old worn-out faggot”). Melgaard makes a perversion not only of the notion of an artist, but also the artist's relationship with the physical 'natural' world – in his hands now an irrelevance, invisible and grotesque. In Melgaard we find complete
alienation and extreme asymmetry.

Melgaard's starkly anti-aesthetic and anti-formalist art offers a new, more complicated, last-chance idea of beauty, one always on the precipice of breakdown and shame. In a crescendo of paint, dolls and crystals, at Gavin Brown’s enterprise Melgaard will present his most ambitious, tragic and unwieldy exhibition to date – Pink never felt so dismal.

Melgaard is a Norwegian artist (b. 1967 in Sydney, Australia), who lives and works in New York. He grew up between Norway and Australia and attended the Academy of Fine Arts, Oslo, the Rijksakademie, Amsterdam, and the Jan Van Eyck Academie Maastricht. Aside from his encompassing artistic practice, Melgaard is a frequent curator, has written some 14 novels, and produced a number of films.

Melgaard has exhibited extensively in the United States and abroad, including solo presentations at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), London; Luxembourg & Dayan, New York; de Appel arts centre, Amsterdam; Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo and Bergen Kunstmuseum, Bergen, Norway; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; and MARTa Herford, Hannover, Germany. In 2011, Melgaard represented Norway at the 54th Venice Biennial, Venice. Upcoming projects include: 9 Artists, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (curated by Bartholomew Ryan) (cat.); 12th Biennale de Lyon, Lyon, France (curated by Gunnar Kvaran); Momentum 7, Nordic Biennial of Contemporary Art, Moss, Norway (curated by Erlend Hammer and Power Ekroth); and a collection display at the Astrup Fearnley Museum, Oslo, Norway.

A relationship developed on random online sex chats is the starting point for this feature-length computer animated film in which the artist and a young Italian individual assume the avatars of computer-generated dummies. The situation developed through their remote correspondence is explored throughout a series of episodes in which each shares stories, ideas and emotions in a disconcerting intensity that often clashes with the nature of the presented images.

Introduced by Lauren Cornell

Two avatars converse amidst a green screen haze. Their bodies are truncated, like two stout soda cans. No necks here, just spherical heads (she brunette, he blond) that swivel on boxy chests. Their so-called ‘private parts’ are covered in leaves, as if they are low-budget 3d renderings of the first man and first woman (except here the protective leaves are in the shape of swimwear). These are the some of the optional bodies offered by Xtranormal, a readymade animation provider through which millions of amateur movies have been made, and through which the artist Frances Stark gave form to a months-long virtual relationship she struck up with a previously unknown man. Unfolding through episodes that feel alternately like installments of a television drama or a recurring dream, the conversations jump between politics, personal biography, and music, escalate quickly from arousal to the (alleged) reaching of sexual climax, and are strewn with awkward silences. All are enunciated by a monotone computerized voice that doesn't inflect or mute any aspect of speech. Here, the mumblings and mutterings--“umm” “oof”--that interrupt speech and manifest inhibitions are as flat and as loud as any other statement, like “you have an impressive analysis capability.” “Eh.”

That the green screen remains empty throughout the piece is significant: a key tool of Hollywood magic, the green screen is what engenders fantasies (like human flight) or patches people into far-flung locales or unlikely situations. Void of animation, it heightens the tension between the two characters, amplifying the projection of fantasy happening between them. At one point, Stark tells him that she is currently obsessed with dancehall music, and shares a sample. His response is disparaging:

HIM: “You must grow up, eh.”
HER: “I’m a professor. That’s very grown up, isn’t it?”
HIM: “Oof. I didn’t have a professor like you.”
HER: “Maybe you did but you didn’t notice. I’m sure the boys in my class don’t notice me like that.”

In a video interview about the work, Stark references the writer David Foster Wallace in regard to one of his most consistent themes: attention (how much people need it and how unnerving and disorienting it can be to receive it). “Whatever you get paid attention for is never what you think is most important about yourself,” he writes. The tentative, curious conversations of the two avatars in My Best Thing reflect this desire to have repressed parts of oneself attended to and seen. Within game worlds, social media, or chat rooms, avatars become the psychological escape hatch from regular bodies, behaviors and perceptions from self and society. In the exchange above, the female character (Stark) suggests the way that she is seen in the classroom overlooks the ways that she really is. What becomes more intimate than the virtual orgasms they have together is their constant emotional prying; their attempts to find ‘unnoticed parts.’ “Show me.” “Show me your face.” “Want to see my best thing?”

My Best Thing captures something very specific about romance and desire at a particular time, both technical (Xtranormal as an available, quotidian consumer animation software) and social (a certain extant freedom of behavior online within social networks). But, by way of the unmarked location and bland characters (undistinguished except for being white in skin tone, or more precisely creme), the work also taps into deeper, more universal dimensions of human connection, desire and fantasy. Its ability to telescope in between two individuals, with their particular quirks, fetishes and needs, and the broader urge to be seen for who you want to be (not who you are) lends it an enduring power. The viewer is left to wonder whether the characters are actually freed by their ephemerality or if theirs is a fleeting release, if the lack of an accountable, physical, evolving human body is ultimately stagnating. Can anonymous, disembodied communication keep you the same way a person can?

In the short story “Everything is Green,” Foster Wallace depicts a man trying to wrench himself from a romantic relationship--perhaps to be more true to his ‘best thing’--but he gets forced back by the presence of his lover: “She is looking outside, from where she is sitting, and I look at her, and there is something in me that can not close up, in that looking. Mayfly has a body. And she is my morning. Say her name.”

Credits

“Written” and “directed” by Frances Stark

Production, sound, editing, subtitles by Chris Svensson

Meta-The-Difference-Between-The-Two-Font by Dexter Sinister

Figures, costumes, animation, voices by Xtranormal

Courtesy of the artist and Gavin Brown's enterprise, New York

Artists

Blalock, Lucas	Leavitt, William
Boshier, Derek	Madani, Tala
Caesar, Jedediah	Mannis, Josh
Callaghan, Joshua	Maslansky, Max
Conte, Vanessa	Mockrin, Jesse
Decker, Michael	Morris, Rebecca
Ferrer, Gabrielle	Nemeroff, Davida
Glenn, Laeh	Orr, Eric
Greely, Hannah	Pardo, Jorge
Hafif, Marcia	Pinsky, Marina
Harkawik, Peter	Ruppersberg, Allen
Hudson, Cannon	Schechter, Asha
Isermann, Jim	Seal, John
Jackson, Patrick	Shire, Peter
Korty, David	Thomson, Mungo
Larner, Liz	Wrinkle, Aaron

Peter Harkawik and Laura Owens discussing Made in Space with MOCtv:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=inhviYBVOhE


Made in Space

1. Someone drank tea. Someone else felt that a specific kind of taco eaten at a particular
geographic location was like a drug. The spices generated a certain kind of energy, or, perhaps, muscle memory. It was 2012.

2. In 2002, "thoughts mixed and burned with gasoline" turned to Orange County, a web without a spider, The Citadel, Eden-Olympia. The commingling of purposefulness and aimlessness was understood to be the effect of Junkspace.

3. In 1981, Peter Schjeldahl took a trip to Los Angeles and wrote a short essay damning our city to a future of cultural irrelevance, lest it somehow invert each and every one of its unique features. He wrote, "The wishfulness of LA's citizens is simply explained as the effect of a life that enforces independence to the point of autism. Try to lean on anything or anyone and you'll fall down[…] Los Angeles is a city without public spaces. There are only private spaces--fenced haciendas of self-maintenance and self-invention--surrounded with the soft, dreamy, zinging-withlight nowhere in particular." Much as Michael Fried's write-off of minimalism as theater, Schjeldahl missed the point.

4. Participants in the 2010 TV series "Wipe Out" drove to Magic Mountain for jouissance: that is, being battered around by brightly colored, slowly rotating foam shapes.

5. In 1986, a pedestrian observed a pair of giant steel springs rolling down the sidewalk near the corner of Wilshire and La Brea. Elsewhere, aphasiacs watched Ronald Reagan on television and were not fooled by his affect. Because they lacked the ability to understand the intended significance of various facial expressions and/or gestures, their experience of his speech was divorced from his image, rendering it as inert and senseless as the printed word.

6. A shopper walks the isles of Home Depot in a stupor, hopelessly trying to assemble a mental list of life goals by way of immediate hardware purchases. Thoughts turn to the specific alienated labor that produced this situation. Is a kindred soul, another loser, in a cubicle somewhere, proliferating this amalgamation of thoughtless spatial constructs, endcap displays stacked to the sky? Is that person horny? Do they have a gaping flesh wound? A fixed quantity of gasoline was converted to smog today. It is 1999.

7. The Mall of America is constructed in 1992. The FDA urges surgeons to abandon silicone in breast implants and the first McDonald's franchise is opened in China. In the words of French anthropologist Marc Augé, "Place and non-place are rather like opposed polarities: the first is never completely erased, the second never totally completed; they are like palimpsests on which the scrambled game of identity and relations is ceaselessly rewritten."

8. Food is a variety of colors. We all eat food. Certain foods appear one color or another on
account of food dye. Regardless of whether or not their color is a lie or we willingly suspend
disbelief (as in the instance of a Starburst -- is it the flavor "Lemon" or the flavor "Yellow"?), we all eat, and we all shit. In painting, mixing color is a complicated process involving the opacity of various pigments and substrates. Mixing too many colors results in a sludge that is invariably described as "muddy." This is much like our digestive system. Foods we eat are broken down by procedures which work in concert; the enzymes in our mouth, the acids of our stomach. The color in foods is combined slowly in our body, until we shit, and see the result of our gastric color mixing: brown. In 2009, The Wrigley Company discontinued their unpopular "Baja California" Starburst flavor.

9. A person discovered a pile of feces directly in the middle of a pair of women's size 10 red pumps. The distance between the shoes and the feces, which looked very much like a chocolatedipped frozen yogurt dessert, or a dog chew, indicated that the person could have been squatting and defecating. This tableau vivant was found in a parking lot behind a chinese restaurant in Beverly Hills in 2008. Every transaction leaves a remainder.

10. In 2001, an auto dealership on the 134 Freeway decided to expand its advertising by taking over an adjacent parking garage. Mannequins, waving and smiling, some posed with balloons, were installed on its upper levels. This visuality of the frontal, of the fleeting glance, produced a sensation not unlike V-effekt in passing drivers. Like a Brechtian stage play, their collective event was stripped of its self-evident nature. That same year, Elizabeth Grosz wrote, "Space, […] outside the ruses of imagination, is not static, fixed, infinitely expandable, infinitely divisible, concrete, extended, continuous, and homogenous, though perhaps we must think in these terms to continue our everyday lives (and the architect is perhaps more invested in this understanding of space than anyone else). Space, like time, is emergence and eruption, oriented not to the ordered, the controlled, the static, but to the event, to movement or action."

11. In 1993, someone sat in a recliner in Long Beach with a VHS deck balanced on each knee. One screen played Hitchcock's "Rope" while the other played Altman's "Short Cuts." Nearby, under a bridge, someone was feeling like his only companion was the city he lived in, the City of Angels. Around the same time, a wallet was left in El Segundo.

12. Two friends, both architects, drove to Brentwood in 1994. They got out of their car and ran alongside OJ Simpson's Bronco, hoping to catch a glimpse of reality in progress and joining thousands of people on the streets and overpasses in communal euphoria.

13. Two curators drove by a flip flop in the road. This was mutually lauded for its demonstrative effect. It was 2013.

Gavin Brown’s enterprise and Johan Kugelberg/Boo-Hooray Gallery, together with Afrika Bambaataa, the Universal Zulu Nation, and Cornell University Library announce the public archiving of one of the most important record collections in the history of hip hop:

The Afrika Bambaataa Master of Records vinyl archive.

From July 11 through August 10, Kugelberg and his team will be organizing, cataloguing, and documenting Afrika Bambaataa’s peerless vinyl collection at Gavin Brown’s enterprise, Monday through Friday between 12 – 5 PM. Visitors are encouraged to stop by, hear some great music and see how the cultural artifacts of this important strand of American history are preserved.

Open archiving, like an archeological dig or a group of students viewing biological research in a museum, is an important and rarely seen part of the process of documenting history. Before the Afrika Bambaataa archive moves to its permanent home at Cornell University’s Hip Hop Collection in the Fall of 2013, Johan Kugelberg and Gavin Brown’s enterprise offer visitors a unique opportunity to experience what is arguably the most important gathering of vinyl in the history of hip hop while it is sorted, organized, archived (and DJ'd) in full view of the public.

Please join the Afrika Bambaataa vinyl archive mailing list and follow us on Facebook and Twitter for announcements of visiting DJs playing selections from the archive during the sort.

Join the mailing list here.

//

Afrika Bambaataa is considered the godfather of hip hop culture and was instrumental in the rise of electro funk and break-beat deejaying beginning in the 1980s. His involvement with Bronx street gang the Black Spades in their transformation into community activists is legendary, as is his founding of the internationally known hip hop organization Universal Zulu Nation. Bambaataa is responsible for spreading and popularizing hip hop’s unmistakable sounds and beats alongside its culture throughout the world.

Originally from the South Bronx, New York, Afrika Bambaataa is among the most influential American DJs.

Due to his early use and mixing of drum machines and computer sounds, Bambaataa created signature beats (such as his first widely popular single “Planet Rock” of 1982), which helped fuel the development of other musical genres such as Freestyle or Latin Freestyle, Miami Bass, Electronica, House, Hip House, and early Techno. He has consistently made records nationally and internationally, spanning the 1980s into the 2000s.

In 2012 Afrika Bambaataa was appointed to a three-year term as a Visiting Scholar at Cornell University, where his vinyl collection will reside as part of the Cornell University Library Hip Hop Collection, the largest collection on Hip Hop culture in the world.

Universal Zulu Nation Link
Cornell Hip Hop Archive Link
Bambaataa Visiting Scholar Link

Seeming to have appeared out of nowhere, the large monochrome paintings of Henry Codax were first exhibited at the downtown non-profit carriage trade in the summer of 2011. With no press release, biography or checklist, the artist's hope was that the paintings would "speak for themselves."

In a recent interview, Henry Codax said of his interest in monochromes, ".... another aspect of monochrome paintings is that they function somewhat like a mirror. They are essentially blanks. With little evidence of the hand that made them, it’s harder to attribute subjectivity to them than with most other art, so people are confronted with themselves a bit more, or at least with their own preoccupations or assumptions about the work, including who made it."¹

For Codax’s Shoot the Lobster exhibition at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, the artist will show 6 small and 2 large paintings, in colors ranging from violet to green to blue to an intense yellow.


¹ Scott, Peter. "An Interview With Henry Codax." GREY Magazine. N.p., 19 Mar. 2013. Web. 11 July 2013.


For further information please call 212.560.0670 or email contact@shootthelobster.notexisting@nodomain.comcom

Rirkrit Tiravanija, untitled 2012 (a study for Karl’s perfect day) or (the incomparable Karl Holmqvist), USA 2012, 57 min

Often in the work of Rirkrit Tiravanija, what interests the artist is not the art in itself, but the life that unfolds around and out of it. Karl Holmqvist, whose work spans performance, poetry and fine art, is filmed as an example of a single life.

He is the image of an artist that is regenerated through the use of speech and that makes his performance the perfect synthesis of life and art.
- Maurizio Bortolotti

An eccentric figure in the contemporary art scene, Holmqvist (born 1964), has attracted the attention of Tiravanija for his artistic work that focuses on reacting to a place, situation or specific area through the creation of books, wallpaper, lamps, video and objects. The modalities of development in his work often suggest the creation of improvised communities formed around the reading of his poems or the staging of his performances.

For more information, and to book tickets, please click here

 In our spring exhibition artworks of New York-based painter Elizabeth Peyton will be on display at the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden. For this exhibition the artist has chosen to show a specific selection of works: Exclusively and for the first time ever in this combination, portraits of musicians are on view in Baden-Baden. For instance you will encounter David Bowie, Pete Doherty, Jessye Norman or Jonas Kaufmann performing on stage.

These portraits attest to Peyton's intensive examination of a most vulnerable but at the same time pivotal moment in the process of artistic creation: the moment in which musicians enter the stage and step in front of the audience. Hence the selected works also reflect creativity as such as much as Elizabeth Peyton's own creative process.

Altogether, there will be 30 oil paintings and works on paper from the last 20 years of Peyton's career on display in Baden-Baden. The vast majority of the exhibits are part of private American collections and have rarely or not all all been shown in Germany. In addition to that Elizabeth Peyton will, for the first time, exhibit a number of photographies of the performances and live events that are the point f departure for most of her works. These images will be reproduced in the exhibition catalog alongside the respective paintings by the artist.

"BRING STUFF IN THAT YOU CAN'T USE, TAKE STUFF AWAY THAT YOU CAN."

Anything that you think might be of use or interest to someone would be welcome: clothing, books, house wares, furnishings, art - absolutely anything. And you are of course welcome to take away anything you that you would like.

So, when you get to Basel, please bring your unwanted stuff to the Free Store, located at alongside Hall 1 on Isteinerstrasse.

For more information, please e-mail:
gallery@gavinbrown.notexisting@nodomain.combiz

Hope to see you there!

Gavin Brown's enterprise, New York
Sadie Coles HQ, London
Galerie Barbara Weiss, Berlin

Title | PLAY, 2013
Duration | 30 minutes
Media | Super8 and HD video transferred to Bluray

Artwork description | PLAY (Part 1) was developed as part of Friedman's residency at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles

In PLAY, 18 couples, some real life couples, others paired by the artist, all of them actors, develop and play out scenes of intimacy. The poetic, intense and humorous situations grow intuitively from a process of improvisational theater games created for the purpose. With this new work Friedman engages with actors and their ability to receive and transmit projected desires while at the same time laying bare theatrical and cinematic devices with Brechtian pleasure. The work is filmed in The Hammer Museum's Billy Wilder Theater, a hippie shack in Topanga Canyon, and the streets of Los Angeles.

Manhattan is always in flux.

What was once the clubhouse for a band of art world 'enfants terribles' is now uninhabitable. Water damage, dirt sub-flooring, and discarded scrap metal is all that remains. Gone is the instantly-recognizable light bright floor of Passerby, the adjoining bar; gone, really, is any resemblance to a gallery at all.

A reclaimed site is appropriate for a pilgrimage.

Twelve years after their first appearance at Gavin Brown’s enterprise in 2001, Rob Pruitt’s pandas return to 436 W 15th St. But it’s actually a sadder story than that. They haven't returned. A single panda now reclaims the space. It is the Last Panda.

This jovial baby squirms in the arms of a human skeleton. Emerging from a toxic gradient void of dystopic tropicalia and framed by the flattening tread of dirty tire tracks, this bony psychopomp seems to breach the picture plane to offer the last living panda to a sculpture of a psychedelic zebra-striped dinosaur. Good taste has no place in this story.

This exhibition exploits the problematic tension of artistic invention threatened with imminent cultural extinction. Pruitt is invested in the myth of the panda: as a symbol of our Anthropocene folly that results in the daily extinction of species, of the effete laziness of the stylized beast, of the beguiling tyranny of the precious, of the over- determined affective relations between man and animal. Held before us like some queer satire of a pieta, the cute baby panda induces guilt with the same potency it did over a decade ago: somewhere in China a plush toy bear rolls off an assembly line in a factory where the real thing once rolled with glee among the bamboo trees. Perhaps, nothing is meant to last.

-Miciah Hussey

WIELS is presenting the first major survey exhibition in Belgium of German artist Thomas Bayrle, a pioneer of Pop, Seriality and Media Art. As such, WIELS continues its alternative reading of art history by foregrounding often overlooked artists whose work shift our understanding of major changes in the history of art and ideas.

Bayrle has worked as an artist and a graphic designer since the mid 1960s, inventing a unique visual language through the production of collages, paintings, sculptures, films and books. In the process, he built an important body of work that is surprisingly consistent, obsessive even, combining allegiances to Pop, Conceptual and Op art alike with wry humor. Despite this, and indeed despite his far-reaching influence on a whole new generation of artists through his tenure as professor at the renowned Städelschule in Frankfurt between 1975 and 2002, he remains relatively little known to the general public.

Like his late Frankfurt artist contemporaries Peter Roehr and Charlotte Posenenske, Bayrle created works in the mid 1960s based on the serial repetition of the same pattern, formal compositions indebted to the seriality of the then-emerging Minimal Art movement. Steeped in many of the ideas of the Frankfurt School, with which it shares geographic proximity, Bayrle's work has all along retained the critical engagement that drove his earliest experiments. His interest in mass culture and incorporation, in the midst of the Cold War, of the symbols of the capitalist and communist societies then charting their antagonistic course on either side of the Wall pervades his oeuvre.

The retrospective exhibition of Bayrle at WIELS will span the artist's entire carreer, from his first painted kinetic machines to his most recent engine installations, the latter recently featured at dOCUMENTA (13). The show will eschew showing work along chronological lines; rather, it will put forward the variety of, at times, contradictory themes in the artist's work, including consumerism and consumer society, political propaganda, sexuality, and religion.

Curated by Devrim Bayar

All images © Sven Laurent

Jeremy Deller: Joy in People is the first mid-career survey of one of Britain’s most significant contemporary artists. Over the past two decades, Jeremy Deller has redefined the rules of contemporary art and become a profound influence on artists emerging today. His practice puts everyday life and experience at the center of his internationally recognized collaborative and interactive work, celebrating how people’s activities transform mass culture or become part of the popular imagination itself. Deller’s statement that “art isn’t about what you make but what you make happen” is reflected in the way that he assembles things, stages events, and orchestrates and directs ephemeral yet galvanizing situations.

Joy in People will radically and dynamically transform CAM’s entire museum space, from the galleries to the café, lobby, and courtyard. The exhibition features a comprehensive selection of Deller’s major installations, photographs, videos, posters, banners, performances, and sound works. Highlights include Open Bedroom (1993), a life-size reconstruction of his first exhibition staged in his parents’ house while they were away on vacation, and Valerie’s Snack Bar, a functioning replica of a Manchester café, originally created as a float for a parade Deller orchestrated in 2009 (complemented by large-scale parade banners, including one designed by David Hockney, and a video of the procession).

Many of Deller’s projects over the years have dealt with the social meanings of popular music and how the use of power by those in authority affects everyday people. An extensive array of public programs is planned to complement the exhibition, including a live performance of Deller’s pivotal 1997 work Acid Brass, in which acid house techno music is played by a traditional brass band, as well as a discussion between the artist and key participants in It Is What It Is, his 2009 project about the Iraq War. CAM’s museum store, CAM POP, will also be specially curated to reflect Deller’s exuberant embrace of both high and low culture.

Dara Friedman explores notions of performativity, urban space, and the individual in the public sphere in her ebullient, poetic films and videos. For Dancer (2011), she enlisted Miami-based dancers of all stripes to dance through the city streets for the camera. Shot on 16mm black-and-white film and transferred to HD video, Dancer celebrates both the city and the medium of dance. With the city streets as a backdrop, dancers improvise, expressing the specificity of their styles and skills and making meaning through movement. Organized by Hammer senior curator Anne Ellegood, Hammer Projects: Dara Friedman is Friedman’s first exhibition in Los Angeles.

 Turner prize-winning artist Mark Leckey explores in this exhibition how our relationships with artworks and common objects are being transformed through new technologies. He has included a provocative mix of historical and contemporary works of art, videos, mechanical objects and archaeological artefacts. Artists include, amongst others, Louise Bourgeois, Richard Hamilton, Robert Gober, James Rosenquist and Jim Shaw.

Leckey presents a kind of 'techno-animism', where the inanimate comes to life, returning us to “an archaic state of being, to aboriginal landscapes of fabulous hybrid creatures, where images are endowed with divine powers, and even rocks and trees have names”.

As modern technology becomes ever more pervasive, objects appear to communicate with us: phones speak back, refrigerators suggest recipes, and websites predict what we want. While taking us into the realms of science fiction, this also throws us back into the past and a more animistic relationship to things around us.

“The status of objects is changing,” argues Leckey, “and we are once again in thrall to an enchanted world full of transformations and correspondences, a wonderful instability between things animate and inanimate, animal and human, mental and material”.

A Hayward Touring exhibiton from Southbank Centre, London

 

Gavin Brown’s enterprise is pleased to present “John Deere Model D,” a sixth solo exhibition in New York by Australian artist James Angus, best known for his manipulations of space and monumental sculptural interventions.

An American icon, the Model D by John Deere was the first tractor to be mass produced by the company, starting in 1923 and lasting nearly 30 years. Lacking any ornamental detail, it was commonly referred to as an unstyled tractor.

To tilt the entire geometry of the Model D tractor is a simple optical gesture, but the implications and unintended reverberations are extremely material. The center of gravity shifts and all functionality is lost, yet elliptical bolts and gears still want to say the same old thing. Pointing to the often permeable boundaries of art and design, perhaps it’s worth asking how the hardware that holds together a steel sculpture by Alexander Calder is made to become so mute.

 

In the end, what remains is a steel and iron sculpture that is strangely difficult to see; an object that vibrates between where it came from and what it has become. This new hybrid seems to yearn for its previous pre-digitized role. But, like Eve, it has bitten the apple and knows it is naked. There is no going back. 

 

Although the forces that shape twenty-first century agribusiness might come from seed labs and stock markets, ultimately farm machinery is rooted in our ancient experience of the physical world as we have always known it. We still make machines that put life in and out of the ground.

John Deere, it should be pointed out, was a blacksmith, and an alchemist of his own kind. 

Angus’ art is part of numerous public and private collections including the Auckland City Art Gallery, New Zealand; At Gallery of Western Australia; Art Gallery of New South Wales; Art Gallery of South Australia; Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; National Gallery of Australia; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; among others.

Previous exhibitions of his work include the Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney; Triple V, Paris; Triple V, Dijon; Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth; Institute of Contemporary Art, Brisbane; Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; Art Gallery of New South Wales; Australian Centre for Contemporary Art; Musée de la Monnaie, Paris; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the 13^th and 16^th Biennale of Sydney, Sydney;  Musée d’Art Contemporain, Lyon; The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.

 

Gavin Brown’s enterprise is pleased to present “Group Self-portraits in ‘Mirror #1 (Six Panels),” a series of seven new paintings by Jonathan Horowitz. This is the third in a series of works in which Horowitz has appropriated Roy Lichtenstein’s 1969-72 Mirror paintings.

Based on Lichtenstein’s 1970 painting “Mirror #1 (Six Panels)”, each “Group Self-portrait” is painted by six different artists, each responsible for one of the six constituent panels. Working from an 11” x 14” print-out of an image downloaded from the Internet, the panels are painted by eye using nothing other than paint and brushes – no projectors, stencils, pencil lines, tape, or rulers are involved. The painters were instructed to try their best to accurately reproduce the image, without consciously imparting any personal style. Inevitably, each artist’s hand is strongly evinced nonetheless. 

Typically, the artist assistant is instructed to mimic the technique and style of a given “master” artist. Any personal expression, gesture, or style is disallowed. Here, in Horowitz’s project, the process instead underscores the particularities of each assistant’s practice. Every mark is in effect a mistake, unique in its wrongness, the individual traces of the painting’s divergence from the original image. Instead of overseeing the 41 other painters, Horowitz joins them in the same solitary activity. Each panel that results is in essence a self-portrait of the maker, reflecting the unique physiologies that make us all different. By underscoring these differences, Horowitz demonstrates that the qualities that might differentiate us from one another ultimately equalize us as well.

Clone, doppelganger, reflection? American-born and Paris resident Sturtevant (born in Lakewood, Ohio) has been questioning the meaning of art and the traditional understanding of the artistic creation process for over half a century. Differentiating repetition in the Deleuzian sense and the question of the original in a reality shaped by simulacra are central to her approach to art, which is characterised by rigorous and tenacious thinking. Since the 1960s, Sturtevant has consistently repeated paintings, sculptures and installations with a view of exploring concepts like "authenticity", "authorship" and "representation"—for example, Andy Warhol's flowers in 1965. The exhibition Image over Image brings together many of her groundbreaking repetitions of works by Warhol, Marcel Duchamp, Joseph Beuys, Jasper Johns and Félix González-Torres, eight of her video installations, and works produced specially for the exhibition. It provides comprehensive insight into the creative activity of an artist who has played a significant role in the history of art since the 1960s.

In recent years, Sturtevant was invited to participate in discussions with a series of artists at Kunsthalle Zürich. She spoke with Wade Guyton, Seth Price, Josh Smith and Kelley Walker, whose works deal with topics relating to repeating and authorship in the context of a reality shaped by digital distribution media, and with AA Bronson, who, like Sturtevant back in the 1960s, caused a furor with subversive and humorous appropriations in the artists collective General Idea. The works by Sturtevant presented in the exhibition Image over Image, which covers her artistic activity since the 1970s, provide an overview of the oeuvre of a visionary artist who constantly subjects both art and reality to critical scrutiny.

When Sturtevant presented her repetitions—including Warhol's flowers—in her first solo show at the Bianchini Gallery in New York in 1965, she was met with incomprehension, reproach and indignation. Her works were understood superficially as copies. However, in repeating works, Sturtevant wanted to open up the space behind them, to initiate a critical discussion about the surface, the product, the copyright and the autonomy and the silent power of art. Warhol himself, who blithely left behind the debates about the original and reproduction and rendered the principle of uniqueness obsolete, made an original screen available to her for her flower series. With her works, she also anticipated Gilles Deleuze's ideas about difference and repetition in his 1968 book of the same name. In addition to numerous Warhol flowers, Sturtevant also produced other works after Warhol and after Frank Stella, Roy Lichtenstein, Marcel Duchamp, Joseph Beuys and James Rosenquist, whose surnames she refers to in the titles of her works—along with the title of the original—hence alluding to the iconic nature of a name behind which a work can even disappear. In 1974, the criticism of her approach became so intensive, Sturtevant decided not to create any more art until, she said, the retards caught up. This happened in the 1980s with the emergence of the generation of appropriation artists, including, for example, Sherrie Levine, Louise Lawler and Richard Prince. In the mid-1990s, Sturtevant shifted her focus to younger contemporaries like Keith Haring, Félix González-Torres and Robert Gober, but with the same instinct for works that would instantly become icons of art history.

Since 2000, she has been combining images from the mass media with her own film material. The resulting video installations go beyond the internal concerns of the art scene and extend the functioning of art to include the cyber world and the digital revolution. Sturtevant focuses on the ubiquity of images which surround us day in, day out and affect our perception of reality, presents stereotypes, and takes a sharp and critical look at a lethargic society which is increasingly encompassed by a digitally shaped surface and moulded by the experience industry: "What is currently compelling is our pervasive cybernetic mode, which plunks copyright into mythology, makes origins a romantic notion, and pushes creativity outside the self. Remake, reuse, reassemble, recombine—that's the way to go." (Sturtevant)

The exhibition Sturtevant: Image over Image is produced by Moderna Museet in Stockholm (17 March–26 August 2012) in collaboration with Kunsthalle Zürich (17 November 2012–20 January 2013). Curators: Fredrik Liew and Beatrix Ruf.

Publication
Sturtevant. Image over Image contains numerous images and texts by Daniel Birnbaum, Bruce Hainley, Fredrik Liew, Paul McCarthy, Stéphanie Moisdon, Beatrix Ruf and the artist, produced in cooperation with Moderna Museet, published by JRP|Ringier.


Main sponsor of the exhibition: Swiss Re
Kunsthalle Zürich thanks Präsidialdepartement der Stadt Zürich, LUMA Foundation, Hulda and Gustav Zumsteg Foundation.

 In works that range from intimate poetic objects to large-scale neon signs, Martin Creed (British, b. 1968) reevaluates the status of art with a generous sense of humor. As part of a yearlong residency at MCA Chicago, Creed brings his avant-garde sensibility to the building and the city. In each month of 2012, Creed unveils an artwork in a different space of the MCA, progressing upward through four floors of the building and extending his work outward to the sculpture garden and plaza and into the city of Chicago. Some works live as sculptures in the museum’s public spaces, and some projects are site specific—for instance, murals in the atrium and café. Others still, such as a work that takes the form of crumpled balls of paper placed in each of the museum’s public spaces, play with the notion of the carefully curated object. Extending his project beyond the MCA, Creed—who fronts a rock band—explores the city’s vibrant music scene as well.

The artist’s work and projects enliven the museum and the city and involve visitors in unexpected ways. As objects are presented throughout the building and city over the course of the year, Creed also gives several performances, building toward the US premiere of his first ballet, presented in the MCA’s theater in the fall of 2012. Martin Creed Plays Chicago connects this renowned artist to the MCA and the city of Chicago in ways that are as multifaceted as his practice.

Creed is one of the United Kingdom’s leading artists and winner of the 2001 Turner Prize. He lives and works in London and spends time in Alicudi, Italy. Creed’s work has been exhibited widely at a variety of international venues, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Moscow Museum of Modern Art; the Centre Pompidou–Metz, France; Tate Modern, London; and Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, the Netherlands.

To read more about the project, follow Martin Creed Plays Chicago, a blog documenting the residency as it unfolds.

To hear from Martin about the works in the exhibition, access the audio tour on the MCA’s channel.

Assuming the roles of artistic producer, publisher, filmmaker, collaborator, curator, parade organizer and cultural archivist, Jeremy Deller is an artist working in constant search for a genuine dialogue with the public. His major works range from The Battle of Orgreave (An Injury to One is an Injury to All), 2004— a filmed re-enactment of a 1980’s miner’s strikes in the north of England, to It Is What It Is, 2009, in which—together with an Iraqi citizen, a U.S. soldier, and the remains of a car destroyed by a bomb in Baghdad—he toured the country. Deller’s most recent major project Sacrilege, 2012, is a to-scale inflatable replica of British pre-Neolithic monument Stonehenge.

For his second solo-exhibition at Gavin Brown’s enterprise, Deller presents a series of silk-screened posters bringing together a number of text-based ideas he has been working with in the last five years. Referencing a particular British cultural context, these works present a complex portrait of contemporary society with direct means. Along with his 1995 installation, “I Heart Melancholy”, Deller also presents two recent biopic films exploring the lives of British eccentrics, Adrian Street and Bruce Lacey.

Deller’s interest lies in the men’s lives - inseparable from their carnivalesque creativity and heroic contributions to British pop-culture - and how this butts up and meshes against society as a whole. Deller’s work takes joy in the extraordinary possibilities of everyday lives, what he has called ‘social surrealism’.

Adrian Street, born in a Welsh mining town, fled at the age of 16 to 1950’s London to pursue a career as a professional wrestler. While hanging out in bohemian London’s Soho district, with the likes of Francis Bacon and the Kray Twins’, he developed a cross-dressing persona that combined hyper-camp, glam-rock and post war pop culture with the macho attitude of his working class past. His increasingly exotic image took him to Florida where he now lives, still wrestling in his 70s and running an artisan business, producing bespoke costumes for the wrestling industry.

Bruce Lacey, now in his mid-eighties, has been an artist, performer and “silly-bugger” since the 1950’s. During this time he has worked with The Beatles, Spike Milligan and Peter Sellers and produced - or more aptly invented - numerous machines and automata, his most-prized of which, Rosa Bosom, won the ‘Alternative Miss World’ in 1985. Deller’s film, made in collaboration with director Nick Abrahams, attempts to chart the oddball happenings of Lacey and his family, whom he frequently involved in mysterious new-age performances.



Jeremy Deller’s Joy in People, organized by the Hayward Gallery, London, is currently on show at ICA Philadelphia and will tour to the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, MO in Spring 2013, (Feb 1 – April 28). Deller will present a solo exhibition at the British Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale, 2013.

He studied art history at the Courtauld Institute of Art and the University of Sussex, and in 2004 won the Turner Prize. Monographic exhibitions include: Unconvention (1999, Centre for Visual Arts, Cardiff), After the Goldrush (2002, Wattis Institute, San Francisco), Folk Archive with Alan Kane (2004, Centre Pompidou, Paris and Barbican Art Gallery, London), Jeremy Deller (2005, Kunstverein, Munich), From One Revolution to Another (2008, Palais de Tokyo, Paris), It Is What It Is: Conversations About Iraq (2009, Creative Time and New Museum, New York, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, and Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago), and Processions (2009, Cornerhouse, Manchester).

"Well, I think you try to get into the present tense in the work. It’s something that’s more common in music and singing, but not so much in painting. It’s really kind of impossible to achieve in painting, but that’s really what I’m trying to do." Alex Katz


Gavin Brown's enterprise is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of new paintings by Alex Katz.
Opening November 10, this will be Katz’s second exhibition at the gallery.

Alex Katz is, without doubt, the preeminent painter of modern life. Over the past fifty years he has defined the American visual vocabulary: no one is more influential, more iconic, and more enduring. What is perhaps most remarkable about Alex Katz is that at 86, he continues to mirror the present moment. He continues to describe our lived experience, here in 2012. Like all great painters his work is both beyond and rooted in time. His work is timeless. The theme is time itself.
For his latest exhibition Katz presents 11 paintings, each of women, each wearing a headscarf. While we are used to contemporary clothing slicing the picture plane of a Katz painting, reminding us that we are in the here and now, this cloth feels different. This is a newer and graver moment. What clue is being laid here? Are these women in mourning? Or are they simply what they have always been: Women, and all that entails - Sisters, Mothers, Daughters, Wives.
In each painting he crystallizes the eternity of the moment with the deftest of touches. These faces become surfaces to reflect Light - that which describes time and also is time. He captures something that approximates an eternal present tense. This sense of an ever-present now-ness that is a defining characteristic of Katz's art.
Today, in 2012, the particularness of the American experience from which Katz emerged half a century ago has been crowded out. Shouldered right next to it are other voices, each demanding equal hearing. Today, Alex Katz's Americanness reveals itself to be anything but specific to place and time. It is common and universal. It is as transcendent and sacred as the human face.
We approach a crescendo of commonality and shared experience, and these paintings of women, each in the simplest and most ancient of garments, each rendered in the sparest of gestures, remind us of ourselves, of our breath, of the light all around us.



Alex Katz has exhibited widely all over the world for half a century; including major touring retrospectives and solo presentations of his work. In 2012 the artist's work will be the subject of major solo exhibitions at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Tate, St Ives. His work is included the permanent collections of over one hundred important museums worldwide, including The Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, in New York; The Smithsonian Institute, Washington, D.C.; Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, PA; The Art Institute of Chicago; The Tate Gallery, London; the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Tokyo, the Nationalgalerie, Berlin, Tate St. Ives, Cornwall, and Turner Contemporary, Kent.

Fortified with a generous sense of humor, Martin Creed reevaluates the status of art in this virtuosic mash up of music and movement. The Turner Prize–winning artist defines his artistic embrace broadly, from monumental neon signs to poetic objects made from crumpled paper. For this performance, his first ballet, Creed plays lead guitar with his London-based band, joined by phenomenal dancers from the original Sadler Wells production. Creed’s challenge—to compose a work using only the five core positions of classical ballet, each paired with a musical note—creates the conditions for a beguiling collision of rules and spontaneity.

The performance is presented in conjunction with Creed’s year-long MCA artist-in-residence project, in which he creates one visual or performance art work each month throughout 2012.

Running time: 80 minutes
Recommended for adult audiences. Some of the videos contain mature and graphic content. Strobe lights will be used during the performance.

In Visual Arts Faculty Rirkrit Tiravanija’s second feature film, Lung Neaw Visits His Neighbours, he follows 60 year old Lung Neaw (Uncle Neaw) through his daily life as a retired rice farmer in a small village in a Northern Thai Province. Lung Neaw’s simple and humble life offers a contemplative look at the sufficiency of compassion and humility.

__
Urs
Adele
GianCarlo
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In her first solo exhibition in New York, Kerstin Brätsch employs the tradition of stained glassmaking as a device to examine both her own practice as a painter and painting's attendant histories and techniques.

The glass before the painting

To realize this exhibition, Brätsch worked with master glassmaker Urs Rickenbach and his workshop Glas Mäder in Zürich. In this collaboration, Brätsch transforms herself into a neophyte, someone who must speak (or communicate) her works into existence through a glass workshop and its staff. Working with Rickenbach, the artist reflects on her past production and re-deploys various bodies of work, excerpting and reimagining them in a fundamentally different support: glass.

A Delay / a Sample / a Screen

Each glass panel functions as an investigation of the limitation of the given medium. The exhibition presents the intersection of Brätsch’s painting techniques with specific, alchemical glass-making techniques. The works stand at the threshold of being neither fully a painting nor fully glass craft.

Brushstroke as Candy / Brushstroke as Dung

The exhibition draws its title from a 1941 Oskar Schlemmer painting, originally made in relation to his unrealized Lacquer-cabinet in Wuppertal—a flexible structure for the display of various sample techniques the artist produced for the Herberts Lacquer company from 1937 to 1943. Schlemmer produced commercial samples of the supplies by day and painted by night. In Schlemmer’s intimate composition, the figure of the painter is at once commanding and suspicious of his own powers, cautiously navigating between the worlds of a committed aesthetic program and a prohibitive and censorious commercial arena.

Retrospective forecast (arrows going back and forth)

Brätsch’s glass works inhabit the gallery through a series of metal support structures designed in collaboration with GianCarlo Montebello. These structures assist the light through the glass on its way to the viewer. The glass becomes a placeholder for stability, a vessel offering different payloads depending on how it is examined.

Each pane: a research / A study of the QUASI / [The entire body can side-shift]

Montebello’s flexible ‘telescope arms’ and other display constructions untether the work from the more conventional display logic of painting. The glass, unlike painting, disrupts the constant materiality of each piece and pushes Brätsch’s work toward something more variable.

Unstable talismanic rendering

Brätsch's exhibition repositions her work from something that reflects the world back to the viewer (painting), to a thing that stands between that world—arms crossed—and the apprehending subject. The glass works function more like film mediating the light of a projector.

Betwixt and between


DAS INSTITUT (Kerstin Brätsch and Adele Röder) has worked with UNITED BROTHERS (Ei Arakawa and Tomoo Arakawa) since June 2011, 3 months after the earthquake and nuclear crisis in the region of Fukushima. The fact that Tomoo runs a tanning studio in Iwaki, Fukushima became the central material for this collaboration. In October 2011, UNITED BROTHERS participated at the “Reconstruction Festival” in Iwaki, Fukushima with the works made by DAS INSTITUT. This past August DAS INSTITUT visited Japan and Brätsch developed the glass sunshields for Iwaki’s summer dance festival, “31st Iwaki Odori 2012”. The group activated the sunshields at various locations in Iwaki including Tomoo’s tanning salon, Green Tea Gallery, Spa Resort Hawaiians, the temple dedicated the origin of Iwaki Odori, Nakoso beach and the family home of UNITED BROTHERS. Also, Sunshields appeared on the top of Fuji Mountain, Shizuoka, Japan, in order to commemorate the sunlight on the highest point in Japan.

DAS INSTITUT, UNITED BROTHERS, and Sergei Tcherepnin at Gavin Brown’s enterprise is part of a ongoing series of performances, exhibitions and projects that the collaboration is realizing in varying constellations.

GIANCARLO MONTEBELLO was born in 1941 in Milan, Italy. With Teresa Pomodoro, in 1967, Montebello opened a goldsmith’s shop in Milan that exclusively worked with artists. He later founded GEM, a company that produced editions of jewelry by artists such as Sonia Delaunay, Lucio Fontana, Man Ray and Niki de Saint Phalle. In the spring of 1970, Montebello made the acquaintance of Man Ray, who became his mentor for many years. In 1978, GEM ceased to produce editions of artists’ jewelry and began to present works by GianCarlo Montebello. One of Montebello’s first pieces was Punto Colore, or “Point of Color,” its principal feature was mobility. Montebello played a part in establishing the Department of Jewelry at Milan’s European Institute of Design, where he taught Design and Construction Technique in 1984 and 1985. Jewelry produced by GEM was included in the exhibitions The Italian Metamorphosis, Guggenheim Museum, NYC (1993-94), curated by Germano Celant, and New Times, New Thinking; Jewelry in Europe and America, Craft Council Gallery London (1995-1996), curated by Ralph Turner.

URS RICKENBACH (b. 1957) oversees the renowned stained glass workshop of Glas Mäder Zürich (est. 1887). Rickenbach is one of the foremost experts in stained glass painting in Switzerland. As a representative of the board of occupational Union SFG (Schweizerischer Fachverband für Glasmalerei) Rickenbach is responsible for the training of glass painting apprentices. He supervised and led the execution of twelve glass cathedral windows for Grossmünster Zürich (2006-2009) designed by Sigmar Polke.

List of Works
1. Single Brushstrokes in lead from Glow Rod Tanning With... (Various Strokes)
2. Blocked Radiant (for Ioana)
3. Skeleton Steles (L7/III from Blocked Radiants for Ioana)
4. Tempesta Solare (Sunshields for Iwaki Odori)
5. Sigi's Erben (Agate Psychics)**
6. Die Namen/ Die Linien
7. All Ready Maid betwixt and between (Various Shapes)
Kaya II*, Stars and Stripes, Brushstroke ghosts (Masks)
8. Palette Plates
* The KAYA II title-glasses are referring to the collaborative work “KAYA II” between Brätsch and Debo Eilers. Brätsch’s and Eilers’ collaboration “KAYA” started in February 2010, when the two artists included Kaya (born 1996) into their artistic production.
** These works incorporate agate stones sourced from the collection kept by Urs Rickenbach, discarded fragments from an earlier project the glassmaker completed with Sigmar Polke.


New York City SUNRISE / SUNSET

September 29    6:51 / 18:40

October 2          6:53 / 18:37
October 3          6:54 / 18:35
October 4          6:55 / 18:34
October 5          6:56 / 18:32
October 6          6:57 / 18:30

October 9          7:01 / 18:25
October 10        7:02 / 18:24
October 11        7:03 / 18:22
October 12        7:04 / 18:21
October 13        7:05 / 18:19

October 16        7:08 / 18:15
October 17        7:09 / 18:13
October 18        7:10 / 18:12
October 19        7:11 / 18:10
October 20        7:12 / 18:09

October 23        7:16 / 18:04
October 24        7:17 / 18:03
October 25        7:18 / 18:02
October 26        7:19 / 18:00
October 27        7:20 / 17:59

So it went on cooking and the porridge rose over the edge, and still it cooked on until the kitchen and whole house were full, and then the next house, and then the whole street, just as if it wanted to satisfy the hunger of the whole world.

Sweet Porridge by Jacob and William Grimm

Thomas Bayrle’s graphically covered bodies and objects are a world made out of dot and grid, cell and body. Superstructures spread like the fantastical porridge over cities and land, cell after cell, yet never the same, to form an exquisite “jelly” of monotony. The grid rules and connects everything. A continuum of backwards and forwards, up and down, through which a rhythm is formed. In Bayrle’s work nothing is ever definite, but always in flux. Chaos is organization, individual is collective, and the humming rhythm of the cities and machines is silent meditation.

In Strippenzieher, a series of works-on-paper shown in this exhibition, the background becomes the foreground. What was once hidden is illuminated. Formally a structural underpinning for historical works like Capsel or Madonna Mercedes, the Strippenzieher series has become a work of its own. Several individual hands are shown pulling printed pieces of Latex, acting as a community to make a body of work.

When I was working on the face of Mao – or the one of my mother I stretched a small image in 1000 different ways…
I said earlier - we always were working in a team - on an open photocopy machine - 6 hands were stretching pulling pressing strain little pieces of Latex – o boy 

The other central work of the exhibition, BIG BLOCK, approaches the relationship between singular and whole in the form of a V8 engine reconstructed as sculpture. The working rhythm of the machine emulates the life-sustaining beat, which fuels the cells that make up our own bodies. Beat after beat until the monotony releases the meditative sound of women praying the rosary to create a superstructure so “highly efficient as if they have squeezed a dome in a very small, compressed format,” until the motor ultimately reveals its own beauty.

Thomas Bayrle (b. 1937 in Berlin, Germany) has been active since the mid-1960s working in painting, sculpture, fashion and design. His focus on the aestheticisation of the consumer world through magnifying its serial nature, has grouped Bayrle’s practice in the tradition of Pop Art, as well as situated him along fellow German artist Sigmar Polke and Gerhard Richter. Bayrle, lives and works in Frankfurt/Main, Germany. He participated in documenta 3, 1964 and documenta 6, 1977 in Kassel, Germany. From 1972 to 2002 Bayrle was a professor at the Städlschule in Frankfurt/Main. Recent solo exhibitions include Air de Paris, Paris (2012); Dependence, Brussels (2011); Base Progetti per l’Arte, Florence (2010); Musée d’art Moderne et Contemporain, Geneva and his first major survey at Museu d’Art Contemporani, Barcelona (both 2009). Most recently Bayrle was included in dOCUMENTA (13) in Kassel, Germany.

Born in 1927 in Brooklyn, New York, Alex Katz is one of the most important and respected living American artists. In 2012 Katz will celebrate his 85th birthday, and a career that spans a remarkable six decades.

For his exhibition at Tate St Ives Katz brings together over 30 canvases, plus collages and cut-outs, that span the full breadth of his career from the 1950s to now. Given the Gallery’s location on the beach, and the nature of the summer season here, the exhibition places a special emphasis on Katz’s seascapes and beach scenes, as well as images of family holidays and friends, painted in his own seaside retreat of Lincolnville, Maine, where he continues to spend his summers.

To accompany the show Katz has made a personal selection of works from the Tate collection. Drawn from British, European and American artists, he brings together an illuminating cross-generational selection of artists for this special one-room display.

Katz’s paintings are defined by their flatness of colour and form, their economy of line, and their cool but seductive emotional detachment. Working with classical themes of portraiture, landscape, figure studies, marine scenes and flowers, many of Katz’s works picture an everyday America of easy living, leisure and recreation. Influenced as much by style, fashion and music as he is art history, he remains a very classical painter, working in the tradition of European and American artists like Manet, Matisse, and Hopper.
Katz began exhibiting in the 1950s, emerging at a time when Abstract Expressionism was still the dominant force in American art. Whilst his interests were firmly based in the previous generation of artists including Pollock, Rothko, Guston and De Kooning (De Kooning and Guston in particular offered early support and encouragement), his own painting developed in reaction to their work, and he is acknowledged as a hugely influential precursor to the Pop Art movement with which he became associated throughout the 1960s.

Katz has created an unmistakable language and has remained a prolific painter and an influential and important figure for generations of artists, including now senior painters like David Salle, Peter Halley and Richard Prince, as well as younger artists like Brian Calvin, Peter Doig and Elizabeth Peyton.

Alex Katz is a collaboration with Turner Contemporary, Margate, where it will tour in October 2012.

Clone, doppelgänger, reflection? Sturtevant is one of the great enigmas of the art scene. For half a century she has challenged the meaning of art and what it entails to be an artist. Her legendary repetitions of works by Warhol, Duchamp, Beuys and others were groundbreaking, and her work continues to be exceedingly poignant in our digital era of abundance, copies, clones and increasingly complex issues concerning commodities and copyright.

The exhibition Sturtevant: Image over Image at Moderna Museet allows her oeuvre to display its full range. The presence of Sturtevant’s works becomes nearly site-specific in six of the 18 rooms that are usually dedicated to the permanent collection. The artists whose works she has repeated largely overlap with the history of Moderna Museet and its unique collection of Marcel Duchamp, American pop art and minimalism. Moderna Museet also has a history of confronting authenticity – from important replicas to the project Museum of the Fakes which was shown within the exhibition She – A Cathedral in 1966, and the now internationally infamous Brillo boxes. Curator of the exhibition Fredrik Liew says:
“Sturtevant is a pioneer who, at the age of 82, is at the height of her career. She was ridiculed when she made her debut in 1965, and no one at the time made the links between her work and a critical discussion of surface, product, copyright and autonomy. Nor did anyone consider what it could mean that a woman artist was repeating the works of male colleagues. But then, her repetitions came before Barthes, Foucault, Deleuze, Millet and Greer had published their seminal works on these subjects.”

Since 2000, Sturtevant has made several video installations in which she combines mass media images with her own filmed material in a collage-like format. These works emphasise how her oeuvre extends beyond the internal affairs of the art scene. Sturtevant’s harsh and critical gaze is aimed at a lazy society that is increasingly made up of superficiality and experience industry. As Sturtevant herself comments:
“What is currently compelling is our pervasive cybernetic mode, which plunks copyright into mythology, makes origins a romantic notion, and pushes creativity outside the self. Remake, reuse, reassemble, recombine – that's the way to go.”

The exhibition Sturtevant: Image over Image features 30 works, including her repetitions of Andy Warhol, Marcel Duchamp, Jasper Johns and Félix González-Torres, and four of her most recent major video installations. The artist has produced no less than four works specifically for this exhibition – among them a series of repetitions of Marcel Duchamp’s Fresh Widow in the Moderna Museet collection.

Sturtevant was awarded the Golden Lion for her lifetime achievement in art at the Venice Biennale in 2011.


The exhibition is produced jointly by Moderna Museet and Kunsthalle Zürich.

Curator: Fredrik Liew

La Triennale 2012 is very pleased to announce the start of Intense Proximity, a major exhibition of contemporary art opening on April 20th at the newly renovated and expanded Palais de Tokyo and seven other institutions located throughout greater Paris.
Featuring over 130 contributors, Intense Proximity draws upon the fields of visual art, ethnography, anthropology, cinema, literature, music, and performance, and explores the connections between artistic practice and the writing of culture throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The exhibition takes as one of its points of departure the critical legacy of the first half of twentieth century ethnography and the continued fascination in contemporary art with exploring ethnographic poetics.

Beginning with figures including Marc Allégret, André Gide, Marcel Griaule, Wifredo Lam, Pierre Verger, Walker Evans, and Claude Lévi-Strauss, Intense Proximity emphasizes synchronic points of convergence among these names and their work. A full chronological list of all exhibition participants (organized by year of birth) can be found below.
La Triennale 2012 marks the reopening of all three floors of the Palais de Tokyo, which has been refurbished by architects Lacaton & Vassal. Significantly, Intense Proximity also reaches beyond the Palais de Tokyo through its collaborations with seven other institutions in Paris and the surrounding region, including Bétonsalon – Centre for art and research, Centre d’art contemporain d’Ivry – le Crédac, Galliera – musée de la Mode de la Ville de Paris, Grand Palais, Instants Chavirés, Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers, and the Musée du Louvre.

As a prelude to the public opening of La Triennale 2012, Rirkrit Tiravanija will transform the Nave of the Grand Palais into an enormous, festive, twelve-hour banquet as he presents—for the first time in Paris—a large-scale edition of his ongoing artwork, Soup/No Soup. In a gesture of exchange and hospitality, on Saturday, April 7th from noon until midnight, the Grand Palais will give free access for all to share and sample a soup prepared by the artist and his team.

La Triennale 2012 also features a bilingual exhibition guide and a substantial publication, Intense Proximity: An Anthology of the Near and the Far. Edited by Okwui Enwezor, Mélanie Bouteloup, Abdellah Karroum, Émilie Renard, and Claire Staebler—and co-published as two distinct volumes (French and English) by the Centre national des arts plastiques (“CNAP”), and the Réunion des musées nationaux – Grand Palais/Artlys—the anthology features eleven newly commissioned essays by leading figures from the fields of contemporary art, ethnography, and politics, and a series of twenty-six historical texts foregrounding the convergence of artistic practices and the writing of culture throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. At over seven hundred pages, the full-color anthology also includes a series of visual essays from all contributors to the exhibition.

Contributors:

Palais de Tokyo
André Gide et Marc Allégret, Marcel Griaule, Wifredo Lam, Pierre Verger, Walker Evans, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Helen Levitt, Jean Rouch, Carol Rama, Ivan Kozaric, Geta Bratescu, Öyvind Fahlström, Timothy Asch, Lorraine O’Grady, Ahmed Bouanani, Daniel Buren, Sarkis, Georges Adéagbo, Werner Herzog, Antoni Muntadas, Eugenio Dittborn, David Hammons, Annette Messager, El Anatsui, Lothar Baumgarten, Michael Buthe, Haim Steinbach, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Ewa Partum, Adrian Piper, Chantal Akerman, Miklos Onucsan, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Terry Adkins, Teresa Tyszkiewicz, Carrie Mae Weems, Thomas Struth, Anne Lacaton & Jean-Philippe Vassal, Jean-Luc Moulène, Alfredo Jaar, Thomas Hirschhorn, Jochen Lempert, Peter Friedl, Isaac Julien, Meschac Gaba, Dan Perjovschi, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Ariella Azoulay, Huma Bhabha, Luc Delahaye, Rosângela Rennó, Guy Tillim, Claude Closky, Ali Essafi, Monica Bonvicini, Ellen, Gallagher, Alejandra Riera et Andreas M. Fohr, Walid Sadek, Barthélémy Toguo, Ivan Boccara, Minouk Lim, Chris Ofili, Jason Dodge, Joana Hadjithomas et Khalil Joreige, Marcia Kure, Adel Abdessemed, Yto Barrada, Jewyo Rhii, Joost Conijn, Seulgi Lee, Pauline Boudry/Renate Lorenz, Wangechi Mutu, Eric Baudelaire, Emmanuelle Lainé, David Maljkovic, NaoKo TaKaHaShi, Isabelle Cornaro, Aneta Grzeszykowska, Victor Man, Batoul S’Himi, Marie Voignier, Clemens von Wedemeyer, Desire Machine Collective, Nicholas Hlobo, Hiwa K, Bouchra Khalili, Hassan Khan, Selma et Sofiane Ouissi, Younes Rahmoun, Lili Reynaud-Dewar, Köken Ergun, Bojan Fajfric, Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc, Anca Benera et Arnold Estefan, Basim Magdy, Haroon Mirza, Konrad Smolenski, Ziad Antar, Carolina Caycedo, Camille Henrot, Nina Canell, Tarek Atoui, Dominik Lang, Adam Pendleton, Louise Hervé & Chloé Maillet, Karthik Pandian, Aurélien Porte, Ekta Mittal et Yashaswini Raghunandan, Bertille Bak, Neil Beloufa, Dominique Hurth, Mihut Boscu, Centre for Visual Introspection

Bétonsalon – Centre for art and research
Hendrick Danckerts, Édouard Bouët-Willaumez, Germaine Krull, André Lassoudière, Lois Weinberger, Amos Gitaï, Claire Pentecost, Dominique Juhé-Beaulaton, Dan Peterman, Maria Thereza Alves, Mark Dion, Otobong Nkanga, Yo-Yo Gonthier, Pablo Bronstein, Marie Preston

Centre d’art contemporain d’Ivry – le Crédac
Boris Achour

Galliera, musée de la Mode de la Ville de Paris
El Anatsui

Grand Palais
Rirkrit Tiravanija

Instants Chavirés
Skullflower, Astral Social Club, Regenorchester XIV, Api Uiz, Stephen O’Malley, MKM, Seijiro Murayama, Michel Doneda, The Contest of Pleasures, BTR, Gert-Jan Prins, Andy Moor / Yannis Kyriakides, Hubbub

Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers
Pauline Boudry/Renate Lorenz

Musée du Louvre
Françoise Vergès

La Triennale 2012 – Intense Proximity is a project by Artistic Director Okwui Enwezor and Associate Curators Mélanie Bouteloup, Abdellah Karroum, Emilie Renard, and Claire Staebler.

La Triennale is organized at the initiative of the Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication / Direction générale de la création artistique, commissioner, with the Centre national des arts plastiques (CNAP), associate commissioner, and produced by the Palais de Tokyo.

Press information:
presse@latriennale.notexisting@nodomain.comorg

General information:
contact@latriennale.notexisting@nodomain.comorg

Jeremy Deller, born in 1966 in London where he now lives and works, studied art history at the Courtauld Institute of Art before devoting himself to artistic creation in the early 90s. Very interested in the cultural signs carried by slogans or inscriptions in public places, as symbols of identification and belonging, he borrows the alternative communication
methods for the production of stickers, posters, exhibitions fictitious or t-shirts with protest slogans.

The exhibition incorporates almost all of Deller’s major works to date including installations, parade floats, photographs, videos, posters, banners, performance works and sound pieces. In addition, it will feature a reconstruction of Open Bedroom, the artist’s first exhibition held in his parent’s bedroom in 1993, and many other works that never saw an exhibition space. Deller produces a new, narrative diaprojection, in which he describes many of his public interventions and nongallery projects. Another part of the show is the section titled ‘My Failures,’ with only unrealized projects. From the title shields to the special costumes he made for the museum attendants, this exhibition reflects the witty playfulness, the generosity of ideas and the intelligent provocation of his work.

Exhibition organised by the Hayward Gallery, London in association with WIELS Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels. Traveling to the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, USA

ROBERT ARNESON
BREAD AND PUPPET THEATER
JOAN BROWN
DAN COLEN
CARROLL DUNHAM
JASON FOX
LEON GOLUB
DUANE HANSON
LESTER JOHNSON
TULI KUPFERBERG
KEITH MAYERSON
JOHN MCCRACKEN
ROBERT SMITHSON
BOB THOMPSON
WILCHAR

Enter the world of glowing light and vibrant color of “Alex Katz Prints.” Bold portraits, idyllic landscapes, scenes of sophisticated leisure—they’re all here in the works of the renowned contemporary artist. With arresting simplicity of line, color, and form, Katz distills his subjects down to their essence, with a powerful graphic punch.

Alex Katz (b. 1927), known for his bold, hard-edged figurative paintings and prints, is one of the most celebrated artists of his generation. The MFA’s exhibition "Alex Katz Prints," based on an exhibition organized by the Albertina Graphic Collection, Vienna, surveys his career from the sixties to the present with 125 works: prints, unique and editioned cutouts on aluminum, and illustrated books. Katz depicts family members, art-world friends, and Maine landscapes with a cool detachment and a seductive elegance, while walking a tightrope between traditional figuration and pure abstraction. His portraits are among the most recognizable images in contemporary art. The artist’s model and muse for half a century has been his wife, Ada. Images of her in various guises will be on view along with portraits of prominent figures from New York’s art, dance, and poetry worlds. A focal point of the exhibition will be the unique series of painted life-size cutout heads on aluminum, Rush, a 2011 gift from the artist to the MFA. This will be an inaugural showing at the Museum of this exciting piece, which will be installed frieze-like in its own space. Comprising 37 silhouetted painted portrait heads, the series depicts members of the New York cultural scene of the 1960s and ’70s. The exhibition celebrates the promised gift from the artist to the MFA of an archive of his editioned prints.

Since the early 1990s, the work of Rob Pruitt (*1964, Washington DC, USA) combines post-modern pop aesthetics and political satire. In the installation History of the World, Pruitt drafts the exhibition space as an archaeological landscape with fiberglas dinosaur models fabricated by a supplier for local natural history museums. They are given a mirror effect by being covered with black chrome, as if they have risen from a tar pit. The dinosaurs glance at large-scale oil paintings, which show the rooms of people who suffer from hoarder syndrome. The exhibition poignantly condenses the history of the world.

 2011. Thailand/Mexico. Directed by Rirkrit Tiravanija.

In Tiravanija’s second feature, Lung Neaw, a retired farmer, lives in a tranquil village in Chiang Mai, far from the recent political turmoil in Bangkok. At a moment when many people are demanding equality, opportunity, and democracy, we see in Lung Neaw an existence marked by compassion for his environment and his fellow villagers. The film offers a contemplative look at one man’s humble dialogue with his surroundings.

In Thai; English subtitles. 154 min.


Screening times:

Monday, July 16, 2012, 6:00 p.m.
Tuesday, July 17, 2012, 4:00 p.m.
Wednesday, July 18, 2012, 6:00 p.m.
Thursday, July 19, 2012, 4:00 p.m.
Friday, July 20, 2012, 6:00 p.m.
Saturday, July 21, 2012, 7:30 p.m.

MADAME FISSCHER offers a journey through Urs Fischer’s artistic career from the nineties to today. His work, characterized by humor, penchant for paradox, and virtuosity of execution, employs simultaneously an extraordinary diversity of media and materials. It calls into question the history of art and sculpture, our relationship to the body, the notion of time and the status of the object.

Urs Fischer’s art, which privileges polysemy and complexity, avoids any academic weightiness or univocal interpretation. With its combination of illusion and reality, violence and humor, his creative universe appears both logical and absurd. The artist creates unstable equilibriums, whose meaning seems to be constantly shifting. The exhibition’s title itself, “Madame Fisscher” (after the title of the work installed in the museum’s atrium), points to this rejection of a unique interpretation. Does it refer to the artist, his companion, his mother, or perhaps to Madame Tussaud and her famous wax museum? Eliciting in turn - and sometimes simultaneously - surprise, doubt, puzzlement, and concern, the exhibition unfolds precisely in this logic of indetermination and movement.

Sturtevant. This is the artist’s first exhibition in the US for 7 years.

She has been living in Paris for over 20 years. In that time the world has caught up with Sturtevant. Known superficially for her replicas of the work of her contemporaries, she has been consistently opaque and mistaken for something else. This is not a copy. It is itself. The twin is only such because of the existence of the other (twin). Without, the one born first is alone. And yet together they define their difference from one other.

For nearly 50 years Sturtevant has lived a life of armed struggle in the cause of intellectual freedom. She is the annihilator of heritage, of copyright and uniqueness. In this she has been consistently insistent. Her world, her view, has now come into our field of vision. The condition of the simulacrum has come to pass. It reigns supreme. Sturtevant prefigured, in a visionary way, the impact of cybernetics and the digital revolution. We now inhabit the world with eyes as wide as hers ever were.

Elastic Tango/Rock & Rapc Simulacra is the altarpiece of our alienation. It is the Brutal Truth - that now we inhabit the hive with her and the work of art is the scrim through which we touch the physical world outside. Each image of this world out of reach - each edit and each shared simultaneous moment underlines our separation from reality. The mega-pop 'reality' of these images is a mask of truth that hides the lies.

Sturtevant (b. 1930, Lakewood, Ohio) lives and works in Paris, France. Recent exhibitions include retrospective at the Musee Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 2010, 'The Razzle Dazzle of Thinking' and 'Image over Image', which is currently showing at the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, and will move to Kunsthalle Zurich later in the year. Sturtevant was awarded The Golden Lion award for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Biennale in 2011.

Urs Fischer’s multimedia art, which is deeply rooted in sculpture despite the artist’s training as a photographer, unfolds grand gestures with a pop attitude. Born in Switzerland in 1973 and living and working in New York, the artist grapples with scale in a sculptural balancing act. Whether playing with light and shadow, gravity, or materiality, Fischer’s subtle and striking artworks engage in radical spatial interventions that situate his work in the aesthetic tradition of artists like Francis Picabia, Dieter Roth, and Gordon Matta-Clark. His equally abstract, representational, and figurative art probes formal solutions and challenges static art representations by depicting (mechanical) processes in various installations. Searching for each work’s own internal dynamics, the artist cultivates apparent failure and makes chance an integral part of his production. As exemplified by his wax sculptures, whose candlelike forms evolve and disintegrate over the course of the exhibition, Fischer endows unconventional materials such as styrofoam, mirror glass, and glue with temporality, while the vanitas motifs in his still-lifes and skeletons memorialize the transience of the world.

Curated by Gerald Matt and Angela Stief

Jennifer Bornstein is known for her early conceptual performance-based videos, 16 mm films, and photographs. Typical of the early works is the video “Collectors’ Favorites” (1994), in which the artist appears on a famous radio show as a passionate collector of disposable fast-food containers, or the photographic series “Public Libraries and Basketball Courts” (1996-98) in which the artist posed with young pre-adolescent boys from her neighborhood and imitated their facial expressions, gestures, and posture.

Over the past few years, Jennifer Bornstein began to dedicate herself to other forms of image production (besides the photographs, videos, and 16mm films), namely, various manual printing techniques. But her interest in the tactility of old technology dates way back: she used noisy film projectors in an era when the video projectors were quietly tucked away and hidden from view. In the era of digital wonders, she created special effects by the inventive use of household objects. Through the use of manual printing techniques even her sketches are made to be tactile. Instead of using pencil on paper, she prefers etchings, a technique which blossomed over 300 years ago. A quiet sense of humor is just underneath the surface of Bornstein’s etchings and copper engravings that playback momentary scenes in direct opposition to the time and effort she puts into producing them. The etchings often serve as sketches for film projects and are then presented together with the films. In this way, Bornstein creates exhibition displays that put the relationship between the viewer and the work in the center of reflection, and the individual works become stage props in the works’ theatrical staging.

Also in the daadgalerie, Bornstein brings together various new projects in an installative staging, including video work, in which Bornstein wrote a radio play in Yiddish for a Polish radio broadcaster, as well as printmaking, partly based on techniques developed by the artist herself. Bornstein’s new works are concerned with the popular and commercial everyday language and with images of everyday surroundings – very much in the sense of Pop art – as well as her passion for collecting that finds expression in a linguistic categorization and, at times, even a fetishization of everyday impressions. Bornstein employs subtle methods in order to play with our means of perception – first and foremost with the kind of perception that has to do with preconceived ideas: she’s fascinated by the fact that 80% of what we perceive with our eyes is based on what we have already saved in our memories.

Jennifer Bornstein (born in 1970 in Seattle, Washington) lives and works in Los Angeles and Berlin. Bornstein has had numerous exhibitions at international institutions such as the Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis, (2011), the Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach (2009), the CCA Wattis, San Francisco (2008), and she participated in the 2nd Moscow Biennale (2007). She has had solo shows at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2008) and at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2005). Bornstein participated in the Whitney Independent Study Program and, since 2003, has taught at Yale University, among others. In 2010/11, Jennifer Bornstein was a guest of the Berliner Künstlerprogramms.

But man, proud man…
Most ignorant of what he is most assured,
His glassy essence
— Shakespeare

Gavin Brown's enterprise announces the upcoming exhibition, “Self-portraits in Mirror #1”, by Jonathan Horowitz.

In 1969, Roy Lichtenstein completed Mirror #1, the first of more than fifty mirror paintings the artist went on to paint over the next four years. This inaugural work in the mirror series is a large oval painting of a mirror previously in the collection of Mr. and Mrs. S. I. Newhouse Jr., and of all of Lichtenstein’s mirror paintings, it is perhaps the most iconic.

The mirror is both a metaphor for painting (art), and its bitter rival in the contest to “add to the stock of available reality”. It is therefore of little surprise that Lichtenstein’s choice of subject-matter offered him countless precedents, from the Arnolfini Portrait to Las Meninas to A Bar at the Folies-Bergere, to aspire and allude to.

Lichtenstein’s works, however, are discreet images, that deny their context and suppress narrative. They describe reflection rather than utilize it. The mirror surface from which Lichtenstein worked is, as Jonathan Miller puts it, "ideally invisible, since anything which can be seen on them gets in the way of what is to be seen in them." Being strictly pictorial, strict opticality is turned on its head.

This game Lichtenstein was playing, between himself and Clement Greenberg served to literalize the loss of self that is a necessary component in every act of looking. As we prepare to behold ourselves within the mirror’s frame, we experience a loss of identity. Instead of having one’s presence in the world affirmed, we instead discover a disappearance, an annihilation, as we find ourselves instead gazing at our true doppelganger: an empty abstraction, a painted surface, an empty cipher…nothing. The viewer is transformed into a spectral, disturbing presence-absence. Lichtenstein's mirrors went so far as to suggest the dissolution of their first viewer, their first subject: the creator himself.

In this exhibition, Horowitz will present a series of paintings inspired by Mirror #1. Each painting is made by a different individual, including Horowitz himself, and painted by eye from a small printout of the original. Only brushes and paint, and no additional mechanical apparatus, were used. While the dots in Lichtenstein are a sign of the absence of hand and also a sign of massive reproduction, the dots in the Horowitz paintings trace the body’s presence, and the fact of their hand-made-ness. Horowitz stresses the tactile marks that make up the painting, just as Lichtenstein does. But the prize for each artist is different. Every mark within the Horowitz declares itself as human and subjective, a living and mortal self. Each mark bears the imprint of the individual who made it. Horowitz revives the first viewer, the maker, and makes them, though not literally visible, present and felt.

How can one make a self-portrait using the mirror of another's self-portrait? Horowitz occupies the skin of another artist and outsources his subjectivity to another 19 humans, each of whom amplifies and affirms and crushes both Greenberg AND Lichtenstein. These paintings of nothingness, repeated and relentlessly blank, but still yielding no more than difference and no less than self. How are we implicated in this painting? The painter is turning his eyes towards us only in so far as we happen to occupy the same position as his subject.

All that is left is the object itself. The subject and the object become interchangeable. Randomly mutable, radically mute. Just as with the Lichtenstein “original”, there can be no reflection except of their maker(s). Each one differing and reflecting each other in a hall of mirrors where every one becomes the same. We are so multitudinous and multifarious, that the concept of difference, selfhood and even meaning itself becomes meaningless. Our glassy essence is revealed to be a lack, if not the loss, of all identity, as we are returned to ourselves, liberated by our look into the two-dimensional abyss.

Jonathan Horowitz was born in New York in 1966. Recent solo exhibitions include Minimalist Works from the Holocaust Museum, Dundee Contemporary Arts, Dundee, Scotland, 2010-11, Apocalypto Now, Museum Ludwig, Cologne, 2009, and the retrospective exhibition, Jonathan Horowitz: And/Or, P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, New York, 2009. His work is represented in numerous museum collections internationally, including, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Tate Modern, London, and Centre George Pompidou, Paris.

 As a prelude to the public opening of La Triennale 2012 at the Palais de Tokyo and associated institutions in and around Paris on April 20th, the renowned contemporary artist Rirkrit Tiravanija will present Soup/No Soup, a project which will transform the main nave of Grand Palais into an enormous, festive, twelve-hour banquet composed of a single meal of Tom Ka soup. Open to all, this project, which is presented for the first time in Paris, is a large-scale version of an earlier artwork, Soup/No Soup, which premiered at his exhibition in January 2011 in New York.
On Saturday, April 7th, from noon until midnight, for 12 hours non-stop, the Grand Palais will be open to the public, to share and sample a soup prepared and offered by the artist and his team. Generous yet modest, collective yet singular, Soup/No Soup convenes a summoning of all, where each and everyone will be able to enjoy a transactional, immaterial artistic experience based on exchange, encounter, and generosity. From being a passive spectator, the visitor becomes a participant in a developing work.

Since the early 1990s, Tiravanija’s artistic practice has focused on a series of projects, which take the preparation and sharing of meals for those who visit his installations as a context in which the notion of community and associational life is explored. Emphasizing a sense of conviviality and exchange, Tiravanija enacts public encounters centered around the cooking, eating, and sharing of food. Such actions may be understood in terms of the production of literal and interpersonal space, such that visitors to these events create a kind of architecture of hospitality, and social sculpture.
While Tiravanija’s meals find precedents in other contemporary artists who have engaged the culinary, such as Gordon Matta-Clark’s “Food” restaurant (1971-73), Tiravanija’s artworks suggest a complex engagement with what Marcel Mauss once referred to as the “inalienability of the gift,” or, said differently, the complexity of value and exchange when one possesses, gifts, and receives objects from another person. Further, although Tiravanija privileges Thai recipes in his meals, he avoids simplistic associations with exoticism, instead emphasizing the intangible and interpersonal dimensions of experience among others.
With Soup/No Soup, La Triennale right away declares its desire to federate all its energies round an ambitious artistic project that is open to all. In addition to Soup/No Soup La Triennale 2012 will feature a project by Rirkrit Tiravanija in Palais de Tokyo.
Soup/No Soup enjoys the support of The Absolut Company
Soup/No Soup enjoys the support of Emmaus Solidarite residents.

Manchester Art Gallery’s new collaborative programming relationship with London’s Serpentine Gallery launches this February with the opening of a major exhibition from Turner Prize winning artist Mark Leckey.

Work & Leisure will present new work especially commissioned for Manchester as well as a series of live performances by Mark Leckey to take place throughout the run of the 4-week show. The exhibition will include the film Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore, last shown as part of Leckey’s exhibition at London’s Serpentine Gallery in 2011. It will also feature BigBoxIndustrialAction, in which a giant soundsystem meets a three-tonne low pressure steam chest on loan from Ellenroad Engine House, near Rochdale, Greater Manchester, home of the world’s largest working steam mill engine.

Mark Leckey won the Turner Prize in 2008 and this exhibition will cover key moments in his career from his international recognition in the late 1990s up to the present day. His work encompasses sculpture, sound, film and performance and explores the potential of the human imagination to appropriate and to animate a concept, an object or an environment. Leckey also draws on his personal experiences, particularly his fascination with the Manchester dance music scene from his formative years spent in the North West.

Events

Mark Leckey will be giving performances on Thursday evenings during the exhibition. Expect immense sounds, not quite enough to shake the gallery’s paintings onto the floor, but not far off – staff did have to check first to make sure.
Performance dates

Thur 23 Feb
Thur 1 Mar
Thur 8 Mar

All performances are at 6:45pm at Manchester Art Gallery and will last approximately 30 mins.
FREE no need to book.

ROB PRUIT BOOK SIGNING
EXQUISTE SELF PORTRAIT: THE ARTIST
THIS SATURDAY MARCH 10
12-6PM

SIGNED COPIES $50
AND DELUX EDITIONS RANGING FROM $1-$10,000
REFRESHMENTS

BOOM BOOM BY SPENCER SWEENEY

Spencer Sweeney was a featured artist in the 2006 Whitney Biennial and later participated in MoMA's PS1's "That Was Then...This Is Now" exhibition. He is represented by Gavin Brown's enterprise where his 2011 solo show, "The Pharaoh's Lounge" included his lively party paintings and a working sauna. As co-owner of Santos Party House, he often moonlights as a DJ and frequently does promo visuals for the concerts they host in much the same tradition that Peter Doig makes announcements for his Studio Film Club series. Along with artists like Rirkit Tiravanija, Spencer blurs the parameters of traditional art making by creating situations for greater public engagement.

Today Exhibition A presents Boom Boom by Spencer Sweeney. This archival pigment print on paper is available in two sizes, each a signed limited edition of 50.

Gavin Brown’s enterprise announces Space Out an exhibition by Thai artist Udomsak Krisanamis featuring selected works from Krisanamis’s 2011 solo-exhibition at the Kunstverein Freiburg, ‘A Mindful Mission’.

Over the last two decades Krisanamis’s practice has been characterized by his use of collage incorporating newspaper, noodles, cellophane, and paint to form highly built-up reticulated surfaces.

Presented in Space Out is a recent series of paintings that are composed of densely layered acrylic applied vertically with occasional white lines breaking horizontally across. The large elegant surfaces of the works are revealed up close to be rutted and grooved - the evidence of Krisanamis’s obsessive and labor-intensive painting process. Paired with the paintings is a group of collages dripped and splattered with splices of text affixed to the surface, and a scattered pack of upended golf tees - from Chiang Mai to St. Andrews and back again.

Krisanamis was born in 1966 in Bangkok and studied at Chulaongkorn University, Bangkok and the Art Institute of Chicago. Selected solo exhibitions include Kunstverein Freiburg, Freiburg (2011); Kunsthalle Basel, Basel (2003); Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus (2000) and Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh (1999) and shows at Gavin Brown’s enterprise, New York; Giti Nourbakhsch, Berlin, Victoria Miro, London, and Massimo de Carlo, Milan. His work has also been included in several significant group exhibitions including Imagine Peace, Bangkok Art And Culture Center, Bangkok (2010); Back to Black, Kestnergesellschaft, Hanover (2008); Infinite Painting, Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg (2003); Painting at the Edge of the World, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, (2001) Examining Pictures, Whitechapel Art Gallery (1999); Every Day, 11th Biennale of Sydney, (1998); and Project 63, MoMA, (1998).




For more information please contact +1 212 627 5258, press@gavinbrown,biz

1: knock knock
2: who's there?
1: control freak. Now you say “control freak who?”


My own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.
John Scott Haldane



New worlds require new maps.

New worlds require not just new maps, but new ways of making those maps.

New ways of thinking about the nature and function of our social and metaphysical landscapes, because the standard means of description are no longer up to the task.

Uri Aran traces the invisible world about and within us. The topographic schema he creates are formed from atomic elements of overlooked and overworked realities. When found and observed and classified and arranged and shaped by Aran, these particles reveal themselves to be citizens of worlds that crowd our commonplace dreams and fears.

The contents of our hierarchies and our logics are shaken, rattled then rolled onto the field of our perception. We discover new disparate tribes, who share common wordless languages fresh to their tongues - alienation, magic and time counted in breaths.

Aran manipulates the constituent parts with shuffles, folds and stutters, so that new allegiances and coalitions are formed within his tabletop cities, clearing paths through the forest of consciousness with a slash and burn that is one part abandon, one part passion, and two parts control. Objects swap clothes and hopes and orientations, each new identity replacing an old one. This process of substitution allows new ways of seeing to emerge spontaneously from the spaces that lie between each, between them and us, and that lie between me, myself and I.


For more information please contact +1 212 627 5258, press@gavinbrown,biz

Inspired by everyday urban existence, Mark Handforth's sculptures are poetic, lyrical, and wryly comical objects that comment on daily life and human interaction. Through a corporeal engagement with scale and distortion of form, Handforth imbues works such as an illuminated street lamp resting on the ground, a weeping neon moon, and a monumental coat hanger with distinctive personalities. From November 30, 2011 through February 19, 2012, the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), North Miami will present Mark Handforth: Rolling Stop, a major exhibition of the artist's work from 1998 to the present. The exhibition is curated by MOCA Executive Director and Chief Curator Bonnie Clearwater and is part of MOCA's Knight Exhibition Series.

The exhibition brings together 25 works as well as models, including a major new light installation of a solar eclipse, which draws as much from the early 19th-century English Romantic artist William Blake as it does from Miami's ubiquitous neon signage. Occupying 100 feet of the museum's walls with rays of fluorescent fixtures, this installation will highlight the unique space of MOCA's current galleries and will herald the groundbreaking for its new expansion in 2012. The exhibition extends beyond the museum's galleries with works installed on the MOCA Plaza and in the museum's courtyard where Herbal Hill, a sculpture Handforth created for a group show at MOCA in 1998 will be reinstalled. Other locations offsite include the installation of Electric Tree, a giant banyan tree delineated, illuminated and honored with lines of light tracing its limbs in the City of North Miami's Griffing Park, and the pink neon Weeping Moon, 2010 that will glow and weep on a billboard in the Wynwood Arts District of Miami.

Mark Handforth was the first Miami artist to receive a solo show at the Joan Lehman Building of MOCA, North Miami in March 1996. Mark Handforth: Rolling Stop coincides with the museum's celebration of its 15th anniversary in its current Joan Lehman Building. Since 1996, Handforth has received major international recognition and has emerged as an important role model for Miami artists. The exhibition Mark Handforth: Rolling Stop makes a strong statement about MOCA's pivotal role in shaping Miami as an international center for contemporary art.

A catalogue with essays by Bonnie Clearwater, executive director and chief curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami and Tom Eccles, executive director of Bard College's Center for Curatorial Studies accompanies the exhibition.

Kerstin Brätsch and Adele Röder, who have presented their works in numerous exhibition and project formats in association with and under the banner of the collective DAS INSTITUT, present the first direct contrasting of their individual artistic positions at the Kunsthalle Zürich's temporary home in the Museum Bärengasse. In a complex installation comprising reworked and fragmented elements from the architecture of the previous exhibition at the Kunsthalle Zürich, light elements and a new project with United Brothers which, again, takes up the idea of the collective, this show brings together paintings by Kerstin Brätsch and works by Adele Röder who uses a variety of media.

From the outset Kerstin Brätsch and Adele Röder's works explore issues concerning the authenticity of artistic creation and the value and utility of art and artistic formulations. The polarisation between the deconstruction and confirmation of their own artistic practice and the instrumentalisation of both art and the person of the artist herself take place in their works, in their individual practice and in the various collective formats, with which they operate. The two artists repeatedly explore the theme of the virulent marketing of art and the persona of the artist today as occurs in corporate design and in image branding strategies. However, the importance of social networks and the accompanying effects of "viral marketing" are also made explicit.

With this exhibition in the Kunsthalle Zürich the two artists explore their instrumentalisation of and through DAS INSTITUT. After the recent presentation at this year's 54th Venice Biennale and their participation in the exhibition project "Non-solo show, Non-group show" at Kunsthalle Zürich in 2009, the artists opt for a "disclosure" of their individual artistic approaches and, in this way, for the renewed confirmation of what individual creativity, ways of exchange and conveyance can make possible.

As conceptual works, the paintings of Kerstin Brätsch focus their attention on the performative aspect of artistic images today and the accompanying questions of presentation, distribution and the attribution of meaning. Her works are among the most exciting statements to be created in this medium in recent years.

In her works, Adele Röder operates with an abstract system of signs and symbols which she varies in numerous formal and material manifestations. Exploiting the possibilities but also conditions of digital "design" and production, she creates an artistic system that relates in its logic to the symbolism, exemplary nature and presence of signs while simultaneously exploring the ways in which they functions as the bearers of information in art, fashion and design.

The series Glow Rod Tanning_Interchangeable Paintings (Kerstin Brätsch für DAS INSTITUT), which is presented in the Kunsthalle Zürich in the Museum Bärengasse for the first time, consists of paintings on transparent polyester films which can be layered and combined to create constantly changing images. These are contrasted with abstract light and textile elements (Adele Röder for DAS INSTITUT). As a display system, the artists have created a complex construct of encounter but also of the varied translated "use" of their works: Kerstin Brätsch's paintings and Adele Röder's textiles adopt fragments and actual ruins of the exhibition architecture from the Kunsthalle's previous show by Walid Raad. They have them dismantled and transform them into light benches and illuminated showcases. The artificial light opens up another level here: while the viewers are courted by this and associations with tanning studios are evoked, a disturbing complication in the encounter with the work of art also arises. Once again, the artists challenge traditional hierarchies through the "suffering" of painting evoked in this way. The presentation form of the light bench refers to a "consultation" with United Brothers (the artists Ei Arakawa and his brother Tomoo Arakawa, who runs the Blacky Iwaki tanning studio near Fukushima) and incorporates the exhibition into a research project—presented through the exploration of Abstract Anxiety—which culminates in the project "BLACKY Blocked Radiants sunbathed," a collaboration between DAS INSTITUT and United Brothers.


The exhibition is supported by Präsidialdepartement der Stadt Zürich, Swiss Re, LUMA Foundation and Hulda und Gustav Zumsteg-Stiftung.

Kunstmuseum Bonn is the first German museum to show a solo exhibition of Laura Owens who was born in Euclid, Ohio (USA) in 1970 and lives in Los Angeles today. With Laura Owens, who already had several exhibitions at renowned museums like the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles (2003), Kunsthalle Zürich (2006) and Bonnefantenmuseum Maastricht (2007), Kunstmuseum Bonn presents, after Franz Ackermann, yet another important young position in contemporary painting.

Laura Owens undoubtedly takes a special position in the field of young contemporary painting, as her seemingly romantic and naïve pictorial language goes beyond the separation between abstract and figurative art. Only upon a closer look the analytical potential of her paintings dealing with the tradition of modernism becomes visible. Her paintings can be placed somewhere between vital colorism and symbolically charged figuration which at times reveals the absymal, at other times the dreamlike of existence. The almost childlike handwriting of the ornamentally charged paintings provokes the question about the limits of painting as art or as an element of everyday life.

In addition to numerous unique books made in 2011, the exhibition includes two comprehensive new series: One series, including several large-sized works, deals with the representational aspect of painting while the other series with smaller works questions the topic of time.

A catalog published by Kerber Verlag with essays by Stefan Gronert, Stephan Berg and Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer will accompany the exhibition.

New York, NY (September 19, 2011) — Leading contemporary artist Peter Doig will open Siegfried + Poster Project, a new exhibition inspired by Wagner’s epic Der Ring des Nibelungen, at the Arnold & Marie Schwartz Gallery Met on September 27. The Scottish-born Doig is the third artist to create a Gallery Met show in conjunction with the Met’s Robert Lepage-directed new production of the Ring cycle. Lepage’s staging of Siegfried, in which the hero battles treacherous dwarves, a mysterious Wanderer, and the dragon Fafner to win the hand of the warrior maiden Brünnhilde, will premiere on October 27.

Doig’s work is celebrated for its vivid combinations of colors and gentle abstraction, which many critics and art lovers admire for its ability to idealize otherwise prosaic subjects. His best-known works are multi-layered landscapes, often depicting nostalgic scenes from unusual perspectives. He has been nominated for the Turner Prize, won the John Moores Foundation Prize, and has had solo exhibitions in New York, London, and throughout Europe.

Siegfried + Poster Project contains four large-scale distemper posters with images of the opera’s hero. One of Doig’s sources of inspiration for these posters was the 1924 Fritz Lang film Die Nibelungen, a German Expressionist adaptation of the same source legends Wagner used as the foundation for the Ring. The style of the posters is similar to the weekly advertisements Doig paints for his studiofilmclub, a screening series the artist co-created to bring international cinema to his hometown of Port-of-Spain, Trinidad.

In addition, one large-scale painting, Siegfried & Brünnhilde, will hang inside the opera house, at the top of the stairs to the Grand Tier. The painting depicts the climax of the opera, when the hero walks through a circle of fire to awaken the sleeping warrior maiden he is destined to love.

“I was going to avoid the literal but in the end succumbed to Siegfried awakening Brünnhilde with a kiss. Listening to the music, which is so visual in so many ways, inspired me in this direction, and of course it is such a passionate scene,” said Doig, who is well aware of the passionate attachment Ring lovers have to Wagner’s masterwork. “I’m not by any means a Wagner person, so it’s a real challenge to take it in and give it an interpretation. The Ring has got such a mystique about it, and history, and people become obsessed with it. Having listened so much recently whilst painting, I am beginning to understand why.”

Doig is the third contemporary artist Gallery Met Director Dodie Kazanjian has asked to create a Ring-themed exhibition. Last season, Gallery Met presented Julie Mehretu’s Notations After the Ring and Elizabeth Peyton’s Wagner.

“What’s so great when you get artists of this caliber—young, but also in their prime—is you see where their minds go in tackling a subject that maybe they haven’t thought about before,” Kazanjian said. “I’ve always admired Peter’s work—his unique ability to convey a vivid narrative in such richly satisfying visual terms. It also interested me that he is so involved with film and film history, with his studiofilmclub.”

Gallery Met, located in the south lobby of the opera house, is open to the public Mondays through Fridays from 6 p.m. to the end of the last intermission and Saturdays from noon to the end of the evening performance’s last intermission. Admission is free and no appointments are required. Gallery Met is closed on Sundays.

Robert Lepage’s new production of Siegfried will premiere October 27 with Met Principal Conductor Fabio Luisi leading a cast that includes Gary Lehman in the title role, Deborah Voigt as Brünnhilde, Gerhard Siegel as Siegfried’s adoptive father Mime, Eric Owens as Mime’s jealous brother Alberich, Patricia Bardon as the ancient goddess Erda, and Bryn Terfel as the enigmatic Wanderer. Götterdämmerung, the final installment in the Met’s new production of Der Ring des Nibelungen, opens January 27. For more information on the Met’s contemporary visual arts initiatives, which are curated by Dodie Kazanjian, please visit www.metopera.org/gallerymet.

To think with the body, to dance.

Dancer, 2011. Is a new film by Dara Friedman. It is in black and white and 16mm. It is a film about movement.

Inspired partly by the late Pina Bausch (1940-1990) creator of the dance theater movement Tanztheater, Friedman - like Bausch Friedman is not necessarily interested in how people move, but rather, what moves them. To this end, the film observes the dancers' internal monologues, made manifest through self-scripted movement.

People dance in the streets of Miami. Outdoors under the sun and moon. The camera moves along with them. Tethered, it orbits each dancer, like another half. Dancer uses street corners as a stage, street lamps as spotlights and storefronts as backdrops. We see ourselves and how we move. The reason to move is what is filmed here. Not on stage but on a patch of street. A patch of stage shared with the flaneur, the tourist and the worker on lunch break.

Friedman records the body thinking. Its blood pumping, its breath syncopating and its molecules vibrating. In a world where every thing moves, Friedman and her camera embrace those things that are filled with will and agency. Those things that think with steps and choreography.

Dancer is the most recent film in a series of new works by Friedman that focus on performance and public space. In 2007, the Public Art Fund commissioned Musical, 2007-2008, which captured spontaneous actions orchestrated across Manhattan. Similar to Dancer, Musical plays upon the vitality of city life where unexpected encounters can be a daily occurrence.

In 2009, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt commissioned Friedman to create a performance as part of the exhibition "Playing The City". Frankfurt Song, 2010, asked the city's array of street musicians to interpret the Rolling Stone's 1969 song "You Can't Always Get What You Want". The performance and subsequent film takes a snapshot of the city and makes a point of highlighting the endless renaissance of its people, places and politics.

Dancer, 2011, is co-produced by the Miami Art Museum and will be presented at the New World Symphony’s “New World Center Screen” at Art Basel Miami Beach on November 30th, 2011 at 9PM and 9:30PM.

Spencer Sweeney, born and raised in Philadelphia, is a painter, musician and owner of Santa's Party House at 100 Lafayette St, two blocks below Canal. Sweeney is a cultural titan, bestriding the city, yet cloaked from view. He is one the best kept secrets in New York. He is not JUST a painter and not JUST an impresario. Santa's Party House is not JUST the best piece of Relational Aesthetics since the Chat Noir. Not JUST the only place to dance in New York. If the Cabaret Voltaire and Paradise Garage had a baby, it would look and sound like Santa's. So what does that make Spencer Sweeney? Someone past time. An artist defined by his love and curiosity for the best of what we make and what we can make possible.

In his upcoming show at GBE Sweeney presents paintings in a most utilitarian form: The painting as an advertisement with a time and a price and a location. The event? A party. A reason to live. A reason to live in New York City. Hand made to be seen by millions, they are thrown out on the wires and the wireless to alert the party people of a reason to gather. These are paintings in drag, dressed to the nines as commerce. Ads for the weekend, disguised as Fine Art. Oil transfigured into ones and zeros. A party contained in a painting. Less oil, more dancing.

The Pharaoh's Lounge is Sweeney's fourth solo exhibition at the gallery.

For more information please contact +1 212 627 5258, gallery@gavinbrown,biz, press@gavinbrown.notexisting@nodomain.combiz


“From his role as the only non-female in the seminal “fake,” rock band Actress (was it an artist, the American Fine Arts gallery house band, a protest against the boredom of nightlife, a fashion show with noise?) to his recent production of dance records under the name "Housing Projects", Spencer Sweeney has always exploited the allure and excitement of music in order to get attention and remake his public persona. Meanwhile, his exhibitions of paintings and drawings throughout the past few years have revealed - by turns - an anarchic, wild boy sensibility reminiscent of Kippenberger/Oehlen or early Peter Saul and, in his daily pen and pencil drawings, an elegant graphic approach that seems to channel both the visionary hand and ear of William Blake and the precision social caricatures of 19th century dandy Constantin Guys. Whether dealing with images or sounds, Sweeney’s primary concerns are the corrosive and emancipatory potentials of public exposure, and the tactical re-appropriation of pop and sub-cultural codes in order to turn them back against the homogenizing force of the very culture he takes them from.

In his case, music and painting are not the parallel occupations of an information age multi-tasker, they are interchangeable, throw-away stances in an urban milieu that always manages to put us to work no matter how bored or lazy or confused we in fact are. Music is an escape from the laborious piling up of static fine art objects. Painting is a rejection of the entropic time of bars and clubs. Neither is enough but together they can be almost too much, and in Sweeney's art this double activity creates a zone of indistinction where the limits and definitions of each practice are constantly blurred and redrawn. Sweeney proposes a model of work that is less about professionalism and the fabrication of signature products than the ecstatic unworking of a subjectivity always already put to work in the non-stop consumption of lifestyle choices.

It is a kind of impassioned indifference to styles and forms that allows him to elaborate the joyful and perverse distances he opens up between his role as a cultural producer and the steady output of new sensations and perceptions. Whether concocting psychedelic illustrations of impossible, hybrid life-forms (drag queen scat-skaters, cum guzzling Jesus impersonators, etc.) or creating raucous, multi-layered canvases - sometimes prissily rendered in rainbow hues, other times piggishly thrown down in drunken strokes of black or white or physically pierced by plastic flowers, Sweeney unleashes new and unexpected worlds 'more scary and more free' in energetic compositions devised from the ruins and fragments of this one.

Since his brush with death in a rickshaw accident in October of 2003, Spencer Sweeney has reassessed his role as a cultural producer in a world where everything changes except the fact that nothing much happens anymore. Sweeney's post-rickshaw moment is one of cold-eyed clarity, a time of looking forward and inward, a time to dig deeper into the crates and into the mud of subjectivity. In order to lay hold of it there where it is made to happen and destroy it one more time, in order to re-appropriate its constant destruction and begin again from there.”

- John Kelsey

Beneath our feet is an inverted pyramid of excavated earth. It is the cup. The martini glass that will hold our DNA. Hovering over that mythic cup is a horizontal plane of our invention. Together with the chair, the table is a first sculpture. Not a tool or a weapon, but an object autonomously itself while simultaneously integrated into our lived experience. Just like your dog, your table has evolved and entwined with us. It has run alongside, becoming indistinguishable and invisible.

The table is part of the family, it is the stage on which we act. The small personal universe over which we talk, eat, plan our future, pay our bills and raise our children. We see that she's got clean clothes. We put on her little red shoes. We show our pictures on the wall. We sit at the table and look past each other to see the pictures on the walls around us. We look down at plates of food below us on the table, look into each others eyes and we raise a glass. You get up from the table to close the window to the cold and wind. Just then a sparrow flies swiftly in the room, circles round us at the table for a moment, and just as suddenly flies out through the window on the other side.

When we create this new flat space, the earth is lifted up to float 30 inches above the globe. We defy physical reality, make a mockery of gravity and discover ourselves and our imagination. This imaginary plane is the site of an original collective unconscious - spread out flat before us as we gathered around it. A psychic space that was midwife in the birth of our first terrors and the comforts we seek in each other. Above us was an indifferent and infinite dome. Time and death became our intimates.

We are sweet landfill, our own dusty molecules borrowed from the earth. But these objects here now are the feral forms of our unconcious, the aliens. Unmoored from our endless cycle they are lifting off into other dimensions. They are holograms, only resembling 3 dimensions, their imagery like pools of water at night, reflecting us back on our selves. They are our beautiful excess and accumulation. They sit in anticipation of our love and hunger, our nourishment and conversation. Breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Inaugurated in 2001 as the leading tri-annual international exhibition of contemporary art in Japan, the Yokohama Triennale was subsequently held in 2005 and 2008, attracting a total of one million visitors to date. This year’s edition, which marks the 10th anniversary of its founding, will be accompanied by programs that encourage participants to “look, nurture, and connect.”

 Language, and its poetry and rhythm, are central to Frances Stark’s engagement with the world. Borrowing words and phrases from novels, poems, and pop songs, she turns them into visual materials that evoke the process of writing. Stark’s Performa Commission is a semi-autobiographical stroll through the creative chaos of the artist’s life. Featuring dancer, DJ, and Major Lazer ‘Hype Man’ Skerrit Bwoy and artist Mark Leckey’s BigBox sound sytem. Unfolds like the chapters of a book. Mise-en-scène: Kameron Steele. Lead curator: Mark Beasley.

This Summer, the Museum of Contemporary ARt (MCA) Chicago debuts four enormous, whimsically surreal new works on the front plaza by artist Mark Handforth, on view from July 9 to October 10, 2011. This group of dynamic sculptures by Handforth is part of the MCA's commitment to blurring the lines between the inside and outside of the museum; enlivening Chicago with contemporary art beyond the museum walls. Activating the MCA plaza this summer, Handforth's scultpures draw from the visual language of the city-- lamposts, traffic cones, police hats-- while introducing surprising icons into the urban landscape, like an oversized coat hanger and a gargantuan bone and phone handset.

Handforth prefers working in outdoor public spaces without barriers, transforming the geometry of the MCA's building with his four playful installations. LampostSnake takes the material and scale of an urban street lamp and twists it into the form of a coiled snake with the head formed by the lamp. Exuberantly painted with bright colors, it not only contrasts sharply with the MCA facade, but also provides illumination at night.

Another work, Blackbird, takes the form of a giant coat hanger made from brass pipe hand-bent by the artist. This twisted shape is a metaphor for the sculptural process itself, as the bending and twisting of hanger wire is often the starting point for sculptors experimenting with new forms. Handforth's penchant for the surreal is displayed in another work, PhoneBone, that pairs a giant bone, similar to an oversized femur, with an equally out of scale bright yellow telephone handset. The handset cradles the bone as if thrown together by a force of nature.

The fourth and smallest piece, BeatProp, features a crumpled safety cone topped by an English Bobby hat cast in stainless steel and covered with layer upon layer of colorful paint.

Gavin Brown's enterprise is pleased to announce a solo show by Alex Katz opening September 10. This will be the first exhibition by Katz at GBE and his first show in a New York gallery in 2 years.

Since his emergence in the mid fifties alongside the New York School of painters and poets, Alex Katz has become one of the most influential, iconic and enduring figures in the American cultural landscape. His effect is so over-arching that his presence, his style, his vision are absolutely ubiquitous. He has defined our visual post war gaze, and we gladly see the world through his eyes. Now, at the close of the American era we are forced to reassess ourselves. Katz's resolute fidelity to truth in beauty is revealed. It is as profound and timeless as it is contemporary and essential. Alex Katz is immaculate. He is 83 years old.

Katz has exhibited widely all over the world for half a century; including major touring retrospectives and solo presentations of his work.
In 2012 Katz will, amongst other exhibitions, have solo exhibitions at the MFA, Boston and Tate, St Ives.

Alex Katz's work is in the collections of over 100 public institutions worldwide, including: The Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY, Whitney Museum of American Art, NY, The Smithsonian Institute, Washington, D.C., Carnegie Museum of Art, The Art Institute of Chicago, Cleveland Museum, The Tate Gallery, London, the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, National Gallery of Scotland, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Tokyo, and the Nationalgalerie, Berlin.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue illustrating all twenty of Katz's new paintings produced for the show, with text by Lewis Warsh and Angus Cook.

West of Rome Public Art is pleased to announce our forthcoming project Trespass Parade with musician Arto Lindsay and artist Rirkrit Tiravanija. Social awareness is alive in the streets of downtown Los Angeles in the form of a parade. Join us for an afternoon of art, music, dance, free speech, and community activism. Major Los Angeles based contemporary artists and local students are expressing their social and political concerns in the form of a celebration.
 
In this moment of world turmoil and epochal changes Trespass will convey and reiterate, in a creative way, the importance of free speech as the most powerful and effective vehicle for implementing change. Using music, marching, t-shirts printed with political slogans, free speech in this case will be the voices of the most influential contemporary artists, the youth of our time, and the public that will gather with West of Rome on October 2, 2011.

Dear Friend,

You know the song "New York, New York," and how for year after year people have come to New York to"make it." One of the most important examples of that is Andy Warhol, who spawned a generation ofpeople who think they can make it here in this city. Andy Warhol embodies the spirit of the city that stilldraws people. Every day a thousand more kids come to New York propelled by his legacy. And even if thedecades pass and Warhol becomes a vaguer and vaguer character, there will still be something here that's directly linked to him - this pilgrimage, or calling, coming here from the Midwest, Eastern Europe or South-East Asia, to make it big, to be an artist. I think there should be a destination in New York to mark all those
journeys.

There are hundreds of monuments to politicians in the New York City, but I can’t think of any monuments toartists, and other figures who actually represent the lived experience of most of the people who live here.When I was a teenager, I visited Pere Lachaise cemetery in Paris, where Jim Morrison and Oscar Wilde areburied. I was struck by the throngs of people that came to visit the tombs of their idols. When Andy Warhol died, his family had his remains sent back to Pittsburgh, where he was born, and so no such marker for him exists in New York. So a public statue of Warhol has a sense of righting a wrong.

Andy, like so many other artists and performers and people who don’t fit in, moved to New York to behimself, fulfill his dreams and make it big. That’s why I moved here, and that’s what my Andy Monument isabout. Of course it could be argued that someone could just go to the Modern and look at his Soup Cans,but I think there is something to being truly out in streets of New York, to have something you can visit at 4:20 in the morning with your friends.

I will be unveiling the Andy Monument at the North-West corner of Union Square on Wednesday, March 30 at 6:00PM. I hope you will be able to join me to celebrate one of our own.

All my best,

Rob
New York
March 2011

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Peter Nadin – FIRST MARK
June 29 – July 30, 2011

Peter Nadin was born in 1954 in Bromborough in the north of England and moved to New York in 1976, after being presented with the Max Beckman Award at the Brooklyn Museum. Since then, he has lived and worked between New York City and Old Field Farm in Greene County, NY. First Mark is Nadin’s first exhibition in the United States since 1992.

Nadin’s practice has always focused on the possibilities of giving form to consciousness, with his approach to this challenge changing over time. Through the 1970s and 1980s, Nadin’s paintings and sculptures often sought to represent consciousness, however his paintings over the last fifteen years have sought to present the experience, not the objects, of the underlying process of consciousness itself. This shift coincided with the relocation of his studio to Cornwallville, NY, where he began to farm while continuing to paint. The tactile, olfactory, visual, and auditory experiences of the land move Nadin to create marks on linen using materials from the farm: honey, wax, bee propolis, black walnut, elderberry, chicken eggs, and cashmere wool. Nadin’s new paintings and sculptures return his work to the most basic impulse from which it first emerged, the ‘First Mark’. Philosophically complex yet made of simple materials from the earth, Nadin’s work addresses crucial issues of our time—our dire ecological situation and our severance from tradition and identity—whilst simultaneously embodying a simplicity and idealism at its core.

In 2006 Nadin visited Cuba as a delegate to the South American Beekeepers’ Conference. While in Havana he was invited by Rubén Lantarón, director of the Wifredo Lam Center, to exhibit his work. First Mark was first exhibited in Havana in 2007 and traveled to four other Cuban cities: Pinar Del Río, Matanzas, Holguín, and San Antonio de los Baños. The exhibition then travelled to Cuenca, Ecuador. An expanded version of the First Mark series will be shown at Gavin Brown’s enterprise June 29th - July 30th 2011.

The exhibition is accompanied by both a catalogue, Peter Nadin: First Mark, published by Charta, and a free newspaper, specifically conceived for this exhibition, entitled The Bugle. The Bugle features a mosaic of historical and contemporary texts by artists, poets and scientists addressing the overlapping fields of culture and agriculture. The Bugle is edited by Jason Farago and features contributions from Glenn O’Brien, R.L. Beyfuss, Christine Muhlke, April Bloomfield, Andrew McCarron, and many others.

Old Field Farm in Cornwallville now comprises 150 acres of forest, wild bee pasture, a habitat for goats, chickens, hogs, and vegetable and fruit gardens. The farm is beginning a Bootleg Buying Club to allow New Yorkers to buy produce not readily available in retail outlets directly from the farm. During the course of the exhibition the club will operate out of Gavin Brown’s enterprise; afterwards, it will move to 88 Grove Street in the West Village. More information will be available in The Bugle.


Nadin has exhibited in numerous exhibitions worldwide, including solo presentations of his work at, amongst others; Yale Center for British Art, 1992; American Fine Arts one-year poetry room installation 1990-91; Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, 1989; Brooke Alexander Gallery, 1986; Jay Gorney Modern Art, 1985; Le Nouveau Musee Lyon, 1981; and Museum fur (Sub) Kultur Berlin, 1981. Group exhibitions of his work have included Westkunst Cologne, 1981; Walker Art Center, 1983; Kunstmuseum Bern, 1985; Carpenter Center for Visual Arts, Harvard University, 1985; Le Nouveau Musee Lyon, 1986; Stadtische Kunsthalle Dusseldorf, 1987; and the Venice Biennale XLII, 1988. His work has been reviewed in numerous publications including;The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Art forum, Art in America, and Art News.

Nadin’s work is in many international public and private collections including; Museum of Modern Art, New York, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Rooseum, Stockholm, Le Nouveau Musee, Lyon, the Museum fur (Sub) Kultur, Berlin and the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. He has written four books: The First Mark: notes on unlearning how to make art, Edgewise Press, New York, 2006. Twelve Prints And Poems, Grenfell Press, New York, 1998; Tide of Tongues, Thea Westreich, New York, 1991; Still Life, Tanam Press, New York, 1983. He also has coauthored three books: Eating Through Living, Tanam Press, 1981; Eating Friends, Top Stories, New York, 1981: Living, self published, New York, 1980.

The Serpentine Gallery presents a new exhibition conceived by Mark Leckey. In a multi-disciplinary practice that encompasses sculpture, sound, film and performance, Leckey explores the potential of the human imagination to appropriate and to animate a concept, an object or an environment. Drawing on his personal experiences as a London-based artist, who spent his formative years in the north of England, Leckey returns frequently to the themes of desire and transformation.

Leckey’s fascination with the affective power of images is another recurring theme. Meticulously sourced and reconfigured archival footage is a predominant feature of some of his best-known works. Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (1999) is a seminal exploration of the history of underground dance culture in the UK from the mid- 1970s to the early 1990s. Through the brands of clothing they wear, the way they dance and the drugs they take, the clubbers depicted seek meta-morphosis to a state beyond the mundanity of their daily existence.

In the recent performance piece GreenScreenRefrigeratorAction (2010), Leckey sought to communicate the inner life of a ‘smart’ fridge – one that keeps an electronic tally of its contents – and to render audible its ‘voice’. In his bid to become one with the appliance, the artist inhaled refrigerator coolant and draped himself in a green cloak that, at a certain point in the performance, allowed him to morph into the green-screen backdrop against which the fridge was set. Advancing the notion that we can be in constant communication with every aspect of our environment, that everything feels alive, Leckey’s universe is mediated on multiple levels.

For BigBoxStatueAction (2003–11), Leckey places one of his Sound Systems ‘in conversation’ with a modernist sculpture. In order to elicit a response from the sculpture, Leckey serenades it with a sound piece created from sampled music and archive material. If the community of clubbers depicted in Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore share a group mentality and the ‘smart’ fridge of GreenScreenRefrigeratorAction is an appliance with a mind of its own, in BigBoxStatueAction Leckey attempts to coax the sculpture to reveal its thoughts.

Mark Leckey, born 1964, was awarded the Turner Prize in 2008. His work has been widely exhibited internationally, including solo exhibitions at Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne, in 2008 and at Le Consortium, Dijon, in 2007. His performances have recently been presented in New York at the Museum of Modern Art, Abrons Arts Center; at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, both in 2009; and at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, in 2008.