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Welcome to Week in Review, our Sunday round-up of the last 7 days of activity here at Contemporary Art Daily.

This week’s featured exhibitions:

Elad Lassry at Kunsthalle Zurich

Carol Bove at Kimmerich

“The Inner Life of Things” at Frankfurter Kunstverein

Tobias Rehberger at Gio Marconi

Michaela Meise at Johann Koenig

Ei Arakawa at Galerie Neu

“per form” at Francesca Pia

Vincent Fecteau at Greengrassi

Be sure to e-mail us with any tips, observations or complaints and comment on the shows you feel strongly about. Have an excellent week.

After many, many requests, Contemporary Art Daily has set up an automated Twitter feed: @cadaily

Artist: Vincent Fecteau

Venue: Greengrassi, London

Date: March 11 – April 17, 2010

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Full gallery of images and link available after the jump.

Images:

Images courtesy of Greengrassi, London

Link: Vincent Fecteau at Greengrassi

Artists: Leonor Antunes, Jay Chung & Q Takeki Maeda, Josef Dabernig, Terry Fox, Joseph Grigely, Niele Toroni

Venue: Francesca Pia, Zurich

Exhibition Title: per form

Date: March 6 – April 23, 2010

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Full gallery of images, press release and link available after the jump.

Images:

Images courtesy of Francesca Pia, Zurich. Installation views by Stefan Altenburger.

Press Release:

The group exhibition per form makes thematic the borders and cross-overs between action and form. It draws attention to the performative aspects of abstract and formal works and also highlights action that becomes pure form in filmic works. The exhibited artworks are concerned with the artistic means that can represent or formalise a performative moment. Not seeking to illustrate commonalities among the works, the participating artists utilise very different working methods and moreover have different artistic goals, the topic of per form is to provoke a mental impulse/impetus and furthermore provide a platform to display the various models of a synthesis of the formal and performative moments in art.

Link: “per form” at Francesca Pia

Artist: Ei Arakawa

Venue: Galerie Neu, Berlin

Exhibition Title: I am an employee of United

Date: February 18 – March 6, 2010

Performance Dates: February 18 and March 4, 2010

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Full gallery of images, press release and link available after the jump.

Images:

Images courtesy of Galerie Neu, Berlin. Photos by Bogislav Ziemer.

Press Release:

We, whoever happen to be here, invite three performance artists who work as a collective. With the help of amazing organizing impulses, they manage to fly 80000 km (50000 miles) in a calendar year. They are Premiere Executives. Their elite status is constantly renewed by UNITED.

Once, they came upon UNTIED.com, where UNITED employee complaints are made available to the public. The three performance artists made a project inspired by the complaints of UNTIED (dance, music, text, ready-made, and monuments). One thing they made a mental note of was the fact that “the cabin attendants of UNITED formed the first union of its kind in 1945.”

Three performance artists are heading here right now to give us a performance of UNITED and UNTIED.

A. Scores: 1. Dance and Actions 2. Office with object (a large panel) 3. Text performance: How to earn 80000 km in a calendar year 4a. Fake Beer (Food Sample, gathering unlimited) 4b. RIOT THE BAR (emptying bottles) 5. CD: I am an employee of United (Available for €2. Voice performance with some folk instruments) 6. UNTIED monuments (moving)

B. Installation: Three Chairs Fake Beer RIOT THE BAR (bottles) How to earn 80000 km in a calendar year (3 sheets) UNTIED monuments A stack of their performance photos Fake Red wine A Poster (memberships)

C. Performance: Three performance artists A mic and Serge Synthesizer UNTIED monument (outside) A Camera for shooting

Link: Ei Arakawa at Galerie Neu

Artist: Michaela Meise

Venue: Johann Koenig, Berlin

Exhibition Title: Lachende Steine

Date: March 13 – April 24, 2010

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Full gallery of images, press release and link available after the jump.

Images:

Images courtesy of Johann Koenig, Berlin. Photos by Roman März.

Press Release:

Johann König, Berlin presents Michaela Meise’s fourth solo exhibition. The title of the show Lachende Steine (Laughing Stones) refers to a series of sculptures of laughing people with clearly recognizable teeth. This natural laugh with subtly parted lips became quite popular for a short time during the 19th century, however in the classical canon, was generally viewed as ugly and frowned upon as a symbol of Vanitas.

Four tower-like structures stand in the main exhibition space. The towers consist of several wood-core plywood boards assembled into each other at a right angle. On top of each of these structures lies a round plexiglass plate. Optically, these separate elements alluding to the stories of a building, are connected with a wooden rod which goes through a hole on the plexiglass plates. The oiled wood glazed over with aquarell paint presents traces of its previous history: marks of cutting and sawing, holes, rests of paint and covered-up perforations which break with the perfection of the homogenous effect of the surface.

On the wooden boards, Meise has glued various photographs, images from catalogues and text pages which she collected, archived and copied out of books. Additionally, the different tower levels serve as a display for single books and small sculptures. All of these images, texts and objects have been put together in an associative manner and refer to the theme of laughter in sculpture. All in all, the research material chronologically encompasses elements ranging from the small statuettes reduced to a head with legs from Hellenic times (so-called “Baubos”), to essays from Helmuth Plessner and Henri Bergson on the subject of laughter, up to images of a pantomime taken from an American text book.

Corresponding to four constructs of ideas, the four towers are the result of a content-based classification of the material: Meise named them the “Tour de Rire” (Tower of laughter), “Tour de Cri” (Tower of cries), “Tour de Lecture” (Tower of reading) and “Tour de Corps” (Tower of the body).

Evoking furniture-like spatial structures, the four “towers” serve at the same time as supports, architectural models and sculptures. The rigorous minimalistic construction is broken by the intended provisional manner of manufacture, emphasizing handcraft. Functioning as mediums of information, the simple forms connect the various collage-like layers of information with each other and allow them to appear as a kind of complex system of reference.

The video “Lettre to the Eltern” on show in the small exhibition space, deals with the French sculptor Jean Baptiste Carpeux and one of his most famous sculptures, the “Neapolitan Fisherboy”. It was this sculpture which served as a starting point for Michaela Meise’s research. In 1857, Carpeaux wrote a melodramatic letter to his parents in which he described his experiences during his travels through Italy, during which time he also completed the aforementioned sculpture. Carpeaux was one of the first artists in the 19th century to fiercely promote and supervise the duplication of his own sculptures. In particular, he had countless replicas of the popular figure of the “Neapolitan Fischerboy” produced in his studio, in different sizes, materials and other variations. The different versions of the sculpture were photographed by the artist in several museums and can be seen in the video together with other images she found in catalogues and books. In addition to the sequence of partly animated images, the letter is also read out loud three times; one time alternating between German and French by Dirk von Lowtzow and Nadira Husain and lastly in English by Josephine Pryde.

Michaela Meise (*1976), studied at the Städelschule Frankfurt a.M. Her works were recently shown in solo and group exhibitions at the Badischen Kunstverein (“Ding und Körper”, 2009), the Chealsea Art Museum in New York (“Modern, Modern” 2008), at the Basis e.V. in Frankfurt (2008) as well as at the Greene Naftali, New York (2009). An individual exhibition is currently being planned for 2010 at the Grazer Kunstverein.

Link: Michaela Meise at Johann Koenig

Artist: Tobias Rehberger

Venue: Gio Marconi, Milan

Exhibition Title: beat me!…

Date: March 11 – April 17, 2010

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Full gallery of images, press release and link available after the jump.

Images:

Images courtesy of Gio Marconi, Milan

Press Release:

Giò Marconi gallery is pleased to announce the third solo exhibition of German artist Tobias Rehberger: “beat me!..”

On display on the gallery’s groundfloor are various groups of works: among them are the room-sized lamp installation “The great Disarray Swindle” (2009), a big binary clock with several images of Michael Jackson, two cuckoo clocks that reproduce the typical scream of the King op Pop, a number of glass boxes containing various digital prints and “C’il Eam Habbim” (2005), a shooting range that has been shown in the gardens of Villa Manin in 2005.

The over-all theme of the show is the iconic figure of Michael Jackson. In recycling a contemporary icon such as Michael Jackson, Rehberger’s approach is not that of a pop artist who is romanticizing about his idol, he much rather recognizes the variety of forms the icon can represent and the cultural implications they evoke: in the large binary clock the huge transformation Jackson underwent from his cute beginnings with the Jackson Fives to his rather scary and otherworldly appearance he took on later in his carreer becomes apparent.

In the shooting range the hybrid figure of the two popular icons Bambi and Jackson is transformed into a moving target the viewer can aim at. Both the helpless animal and the childlike rockstar confront us with their innocence and impose a sense of collective guilt onto the viewer while they are at the same time vividly demonstrating the interrelation of violence and entertainment. The third variation of the theme can especially be seen in the glass boxes where Rehberger focuses on and plays with the hour of Michael Jackson’s death: 12:26.

Many of the exhibited works, are, in fact, references to time: both the big binary clock and the glass boxes that all deal in one way or the other with the hour of Jackson’s death function as a memento. It is the omnipresent theme of transience that is captured in the show and although Michael Jackson’s image is everywhere the viewer is continuously reminded of his death.

The only work beyond the Michael Jackson context is “The Great Disarray Swindle”, a vast installation consisting of various lamps and a huge tangle of cables that looks like a myriad of cobwebs. Big lamp installations are a reoccuring motif in the works of Tobias Rehberger. It is a testing ground where the artist can experiment with different materials, colours and forms and where he can show that the most functional objects can have not only an aesthetic but also and intellectual value.

In 2009, Tobias Rehberger was commissioned to design the cafeteria for the 53rd Venice Biennial “Making Worlds” (curated by Daniel Birnbaum). For his project “Was du liebst, bringt dich auch zum Weinen” he won the Golden Lion for Best Artist.

Tobias Rehberger was born in Esslingen/Neckar, Germany, in 1966. He studied at the Staedelschule in Frankfurt. He lives and works in Frankfurt.

Tobias Rehberger has had solo shows at: Museum Fridericianum, Kassel; Portikus, Frankfurt; Kunsthalle Basel; FRAC Nord-Pas de Calais, Dunkerque; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden; Museum für Neue Kunst, Karlsruhe; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Fundação de Serralves, Porto; Galerie der Stadt Stuttgart; Artsonje Center Seoul, Korea; Whitechapel Art Gallery, London; Galleria Civica dʼArte Moderna e Contemporanea, Turin; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; Fondazione Prada, Milan; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.

His works have been featured in exhibitions at: Kunstverein Hamburg; Kunstmuseum Luzern; Skulptur.Projekte, Münster; 47th Venice Biennial; Deichtorhallen, Hamburg; manifesta2, Luxemburg; Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin; Hirshhorn Museum, Washington; Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg; Expo 2000, Hannover; 50th Venice Biennial; ZKM, Karlsruhe; Museion, Bozen; Villa Manin, Centro d’Arte Contemporanea, Codroipo; Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Castilla y Leon, Leon; Centre d’Art Contemporain, Geneva; Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg; Museum fuer Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; 53rd Venice Biennial; Maxxi, Rome.

Link: Tobias Rehberger at Gio Marconi

Artists: Nina Canell, Florian Haas, Till Krause, Bettina Lauck, Yoon Jean Lee, Egill Sæbjörnsson, Andreas Wegner

Venue: Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt

Exhibition Title: The Inner Life of Things

Date: February 5 – April 25, 2010

Curated By: Holger Kube Ventura

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Full gallery of images, press release and link available after the jump.

Images:

Images courtesy of Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt. Photos by Norbert Miguletz.

Press Release:

The works and projects by Nina Canell, Florian Haas, Till Krause, Bettina Lauck, Yoon Jean Lee, Egill Sæbjörnsson and Andreas Wegner present various methods in the search for the “inner life of thing”. They show painterly, photographic or filmed effigies of mundane objects, for example bottles, glasses, balls, stones, mushrooms, flowers, tools, toys or everyday products.

Adopting diverse observational and representational approaches, they attempt to draw conclusions on the being of objects, by way of their forms. They thereby produce something fundamentally new too: apparently found or artificially created objects reveal quite unexpected traits through serial photographic analysis and staged or contextual configurations.

The works brought together in the exhibition question in exemplary fashion the character of the “real world” as well as the observer’s relationship to it. In addition to the seven artistic positions taken, some exhibits from the Sammlung des Museum der Dinge / Werkbundarchiv (Berlin) will be on display.

Link: “The Inner Life of Things” at Frankfurter Kunstverein

Artist: Carol Bove

Venue: Kimmerich, New York

Date: March 5 – May 1, 2010

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Full gallery of images, press release and link available after the jump.

Images:

Images courtesy of Kimmerich, New York

Press Release:

Link: Carol Bove at Kimmerich

Artist: Elad Lassry

Venue: Kunsthalle Zurich

Date: February 13 – April 25, 2010

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Full gallery of images, press release and link available after the jump.

Images:

Images courtesy of Kunsthalle Zurich

Press Release:

In his both visually seductive and irritating photographic and filmic works, Elad Lassry, who was born in Tel Aviv in 1977 and lives and works in Los Angeles, explores canonical ideas about the use of images as influenced by various technologies and the history of the media.

Elad Lassry’s exhibition in the Kunsthalle Zürich is the artist’s first comprehensive institutional exhibition. The approximately 45 photographs and five films presented in the exhibition include works that provide an overview of his activity of the past five years along with some new works which were created for the exhibition.

Elad Lassry’s photographs – everyday and design objects, fruit and vegetable still lifes, human and animal portraits, landscapes and cityscapes – allude to visual features and image constructions that have been used in photography, advertising, magazines and illustrated books, and in films. What interests him in this context is analogue source material and duplication methods and the development of different types of images in the history of the image before they were incorporated into the digital flood of the now omnipresent archive of available images. His photographic works, which do not usually exceed the format of a magazine or printed material, comprise either collages of acquired printed matter or newly-composed photographs. The collages consist of found illustrated single and double-page spreads from magazines which Lassry either reworks by heightening their design elements or reuses them several times for individual works as duplicated printed products.

In terms of their visual appearance, they differ through the nature of their use, and have already undergone, so to speak, additional anonymous and temporal “applied design” as the alteration of their form. The artist contrasts these unique specimens, in which he makes direct use of products of analogue duplication methods, with his far more frequent photographs. He plays here with the relationship between analogue and digital methods of producing images  and, using well known images, questions the image itself by testing the omnipresence of images for the possibility of singularity. For example, the numerous portraits of the actor Anthony Perkins which Lassry manipulates digitally originate from analogue photographic archives. In treating them in this way he shines the spotlight on the specific nature of the individual portraits of Perkins and, at the same time the typological nature of the film industry’s publicity portrait. Other images used by Lassry are based on publicity shots, illustrated design books and animal photographs – found images which he restages in the studio using elaborate processes and which initiate and implement multiple processes of the complexification of interpretation, composition, production, original and reproduction on their way to becoming a new image.

Lassry’s photographs make use of the attractiveness of the familiarity of these images. However, they are almost too intensely coloured, too abstract, too staged. In addition this process of visual emphasis, they are presented in matching coloured frames which, on yet another level, thematicise critically the relationship between the image and the “picture” as a utilitarian object, refer to the history of the presentation of objects as art and the aestheticization of perception, and prompt distortions, and therefore, ruptures in the stereotype and the customary – in both temporal and interpretational terms – process of our perception of the images. The artist further expands these irritating presentation “pedestals” in his exhibitions by placing the photographic image beside film projections which are equivalent in terms of format and presentational form. Lassry’s films, which are always silent, also strain filmic conventions and act through the heightening of the fields of tension between realism and abstraction, narrative and abstracting visual language, still photography and camera movement.

Untitled (Passacaglia), 2010, the new film which Elad Lassry made for the exhibition in the Kunsthalle Zürich presents an exemplary combination of his complex approach and exploration of issues concerning the circulation, reception and media history of images which the artist encounters on the journey to his visually striking works – works which convince by virtue of their inherent and new visual idiom. As in all his works, the film is initiated by historical models and conventions of representation as “shaped” by media and taste. The “models” for the film presented here, aesthetic clichés that have become part of every day design, such as the “California drop cloth”, a fabric pattern that refers to American expressionism, and trivialised visual references to, for example, the works of Jackson Pollock, and is used for numerous interior fittings. The film also incorporates an exploration of methods for the reading of art works for television based on insights from psychology and perception theory and the translation of a well-known painting by Robert Delaunay from 1916, Tall Portuguese Women, into a set for the dance newly arranged by Lassry with dancers from the New York City Ballet. The short film’s probing tracking shots create penetrating images and an irritating work which does not provide insight into a choreography, a painting, a stage set or a story but renders tangible the process of seeing, that is the complex experience which is realised in the direct relationship of the seeing subject to the seen object. This is perhaps the reason why, in the final shot the dancers, who are presented up to then as objects like the set and choreography, smile directly at us.

Link: Elad Lassry at Kunsthalle Zurich

Welcome to Week in Review, our Sunday round-up of the last 7 days of activity here at Contemporary Art Daily.

This week’s featured exhibitions:

Daido Moriyama at Luhring Augustine

“ars viva 09/10″ at Kölnischer Kunstverein

Amelie von Wulffen at Crone

Valentin Carron at Palais de Tokyo

Jean-Frédéric Schnyder at Eva Presenhuber

Meredyth Sparks at Elizabeth Dee

Tris Vonna-Michell at Capitain Petzel

Stanley Brouwn at Micheline Szwajcer

Be sure to e-mail us with any tips, observations or complaints and comment on the shows you feel strongly about. Have an excellent week.

Artist: Stanely Brouwn

Venue: Micheline Szwajcer, Antwerp

Date: January 18 – March 22, 2010

Full gallery of images and link available after the jump.

Images:

Images courtesy of Galerie Micheline Szwajcer, Antwerp

Link: Stanley Brouwn at Micheline Szwajcer

Artist: Tris Vonna-Michell

Venue: Capitain Petzel, Berlin

Date: March 12 – April 17, 2010

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Full gallery of images, press release and link available after the jump.

Images:

Images courtesy of Capitain Petzel Gallery, Berlin

Press Release:

Wasteful Illuminations 2008 – ongoing

Wasteful Illuminations developed from a recording session – references were made to the surroundings in which the recording took place, including the architectural details of the gallery space, many of which were accustomed and manipulated to belong to the totality of the narration and evening itself. These references to the present alternated with the narratives of the past, which became a system of correspondences which also acted as props and prompts to memory. The narrative was dotted with references to fish, fountains, ponds, ceramics, basins, lavatories, tiles, cleanliness, water, flows, transparency, photography, glass, grids. A ceramic model of the gallery space where the recording took place continued to materialise and fracture such compound themes and became an accompanying material illustration to the recording. Prior to the recording session a script was written, yet never directly referred to, but later re-integrated into the entirety of the work and enabled new threads to expand and return to the narrational origins of the piece, that being Japan.

hahn / huhn 2003 – ongoing

so if we are at five-forty-one and i will try to perform a piece relating to berlin if you cant hear me feel free to come closer starts here or europe one facade north pole south pole asia africa four buses one tunnel stand back please s-bahn or u-bahn berlin dog walking wastelands bomb bomb bomb bang bang bang barbwire concrete americans communication again and again why are the russians in such a hurry to get beneath this one train station? march april may june they never return and then they stop the germans say hey this is yours stand back please stand back please mind the gap please a story from berlin i am in my hometown pack my bags bad german dog walking wastelands photographs photographs maps verify my story i am running out of time my german is so fucking bad one document one photograph now dogs titanium german men stand there with guns hes dead its irrelevant one facade one monument one street sign i am failing like i always fail and i am running out of time why didnt you just go on google? youre mocking me bang reinhold hahn find out the cock reinhold huhn bingo nineteen-sixty-two twenty-second of june east to west my female chicken my family and the bullet the bullet now we have a man who dies for communism our female chicken who protects us ive got an image and the story ends i totally forgot about it from the g d r all i want is the two images together walking in circles around and around and around click bang the story concludes and its over history memory theres always meant to be one monument for every dead soldier i am ready with my camera and i look up to the street sign and pull out the camera [egg timer rings] we celebrate the shooter of the female chicken that concludes the story and an egg timer that just rang about thirty-three seconds

Leipziger Calendar Works 2005 – ongoing

im cutting im cutting im tearing im tearing cut cut cut tear tear tear cut cut tear tear and the photographs have been decanted and the photographs from april from dicken dorff to may to may to june from van gogh to april to football to the beginning to origins and now may may day may day and shutters left and right and van gogh and im shredding and almost its almost over may day may day and then its done from one month in solitude and they shred shred shred and they shred and their machines massive machines i have a small machine they have a big machine they have papers millions hundreds of millions of papers and they shred shred shred shred shred and bang exposure too many too many files bad machines i have good machines i have bad machines i have a small machine i have a sh-sh-shredding and im shredding im shredding and im collaging im collaging and tweezers and pritt sticks and calendars calendars and the stasi and they shred shred shred with machines and bang and they say shit and they cut and they cut and they tear eighty-nine october november december revolution they say shit and they cut and they say no, no more, burn, let them burn all over east germany moment in time from leipzig to villages to berlin to stasi smoke synchronicity left right pencils pencil museums museums smoke and the east germans say why is there synchronicity? in this city to the village to east germany to this moment in time smoke pillars pillars synchronicity revolution they say wonderful and the stasi from the stasi they flee they flee they burn the c i a the men the men they collect the lines the shapes the papers the forms the forms are there and they piece it together and they take it away and all that’s left now is this two days left in a room in a room or and egg timer with four minutes left from the shredding from the april to the may to the june and now its complete perfect

Link:

Artist: Meredyth Sparks

Venue: Elizabeth Dee, New York

Exhibition Title: Extraction

Date: February 27 – April 10, 2010

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Full gallery of images, press release and link available after the jump.

Images:

Images courtesy of Elizabeth Dee, New York

Press Release:

Elizabeth Dee is pleased to present Extraction, an exhibition of new collages, sculpture and wall installations by Meredyth Sparks, her second solo-show at the gallery.

Using the documentary photographs of her previous collages as a foundation, pieces that often incorporated images of musical and political figures from the 1970s and 1980s, Sparks introduces a new series of works on paper and stretched canvases in which the figure has largely disappeared. In the absence of these icons, extracted fragments and sections of collage material are imbued with a new and evocative signification, alongside the scanned aluminum foil and piles of glitter that have become Sparks’ signature gesture. Reconfigured, the compositions function as residual imprints upon which Sparks has placed post-it notes, woodcuts and stitched fabric. The resulting collages and paintings, for which she has coined the neologism extractions, intimate the historical avant-garde and the gender-based innovations of the Pattern and Decoration movement, among others.

In several works, the figure re-enters through abstract, fabric forms, including both cut-out templates and cut-away pieces taken from clothing patterns. One colored acetate sculpture gathers all the components needed to make an entire outfit of clothing, while other fabric patterns include vinyl stencils derived from a Kasimir Malevich painting that Sparks has previously integrated into her collages and wall interventions. A life-size wall-piece presents an image of two women applying this vinyl pattern for Sparks’ recent exhibition in Cologne (Projects in Art and Theory, 2009), providing another reminder of the labor-based preoccupations that function as a primary theme throughout the exhibition.

A three-paneled plywood structure, Untitled (2010), invokes a book, annotated and indexed, and serves to house a collection of mnemonic images, post-it notes and a video projected on its surface. The video captures the sunrise and sunset in Sparks’ studio as light is cast over two photographs depicting found graffiti. While one line of graffiti proclaims “you cant erase history,” the other, taken three months later of the same tag, is provocatively amended to read, “u can erase history.” This dialectic—the desire to gain footing against time’s inevitable passing—throws light on the delicate balance struck throughout Sparks’ practice, where temporality and the aesthetic are under constant negotiation.

In addition to her 2008 solo exhibition at Elizabeth Dee, Sparks’ work was featured in the two person exhibition Meredyth Sparks & Richard Aldrich that the gallery presented in 2007. Recent exhibitions include her 2009 solo shows at Projects in Art and Theory, Cologne, Galerie Catherine Bastide, Brussels and Galerie Frank Elbaz, Paris. Sparks’ first monograph, with essays by Nicolas Bourriaud and Robert Hobbs, was published by Monografik Éditions in 2009.

Link: Meredyth Sparks at Elizabeth Dee

Artist: Jean-Frédéric Schnyder

Venue: Eva Presenhuber, Zurich

Date: March 6 – April 30, 2010

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Full gallery of images, press release and link available after the jump.

Images:

Images courtesy of Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich

Press Release:

Galerie Eva Presenhuber is pleased to present a new solo exhibition by Swiss artist Jean-Frédéric Schnyder. The show features Apocalypso, a large-scale work done on canvas in 1979, accompanied by 106 sketches that preceded the accomplishment of said piece, as well as twelve recent sculptures.

It was, among other things, with a cycle of 119 paintings titled Wanderung (Hike) shown at the 1993 Venice Biennale that Jean-Frédéric Schnyder became known to a wide international audience. Yet, it was a decade previous to Venice, with a complex of more than 100 works called Berner Veduten (Bernese Vedute), that he laid the foundations for his perception as an artist who, as if taking an inventory, devotes himself to the serial reproduction of a given reality. Berner Veduten was followed by other quasi-documentary projects, such as the 90-piece Wartesaal (Waiting Room) series dating from 1988/89, a 163-part body of works titled Sonnenuntergang am Zugersee (Sunset at Lake Zug), which was displayed at the Kunsthalle Zurich in 1998, or Baarerstrasse/Zugerstrasse, a work comprising 1000 photographs that were taken between 1999 and 2000.

Due to the bodies of work mentioned above, Schnyder has found himself labeled as an artist-archivist, while also being often noted for his ironical attitude towards his own work. Such characterizations tend to be inadequate, if not misleading. Schnyder’s oeuvre ranges from early conceptual works, wooden sculptures, and fantastical objects made of tin, plastic resin, clay, or Lego bricks to photographic works and, primarily since the 1980s, numerous highly disparate paintings. Central to all of these works is the artist’s reflection on the world surrounding him, whereas the choice of medium and style appears secondary.

A case in point of the diversity of Schnyder’s work, in terms of both form and content, is a monumental piece titled Apocalypso. Measuring 2,75 meters in height and twelve meters in width, the work unfolds a peculiar story of images, which is divided into three principal scenes. During their making, the canvasses, now sewn together, used to cover three walls of a room entirely. The original intention was to paint a palm grove that, from right to left, merges into a pine forest; all but one palm tree has eventually been left of the idea. This fact illustrates just how deeply the painter must have been immersed in his work as he was developing, through images of grandeur, the plot of a story to be told to himself and future viewers. Skeletons standing by a railing, gesticulating, watch colorful planets pass by, while in a circus scene, a black nude lifts a curtain, revealing a staggering tropical scenery.

If his Berner Veduten from 1982, by paying reverence to the historical meaning of the motif, are, on the one hand, depictions of a given reality and thereby significant to the artist’s reception, Jean-Frédéric Schnyder’s versatility, on the other hand, manifested itself in a rather impressive manner three years earlier in his narrative work Apocalypso.

The twelve sculptures made of wood and iron that are shown in the gallery’s anteroom and main room for the first time have trivial titles such as Bett (Bed), Kommode (Chest of drawers), or Uhr (Clock, watch). They are thus another example of Schnyder’s intensive artistic concern with his personal living environment.

Link: Jean-Frédéric Schnyder at Eva Presenhuber

Artist: Valentin Carron

Venue: Palais de Tokyo, Paris

Exhibition Title: Pergola: Monsieur

Date: February 19 – May 16, 2010

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Full gallery of images, press release and link available after the jump.

Images:

Images courtesy of Palais de Tokyo. Photos by André Morin.

Press Release:

1916: Le Corbusier builds a « Villa Turque » (Turkish Villa), the Villa Schwob, flanked by a pergola, in La Chaux-de-Fonds (Switzerland). Some years later, he publishes photos of it in L’Esprit Nouveau. On the ground, in front of the villa, a white smear betrays retouching: the pergola has disappeared. Less than a century later, the Iraqi journalist Muntazer Al-Zaïdi throws his shoes at George W. Bush’s head.

Poltergeists are on the agenda at PERGOLA. Against the background of a haunted modernity, silhouettes of erased lives demand restitution: Swiss tavern lanterns cast a gloom over the museum space, the ventilation shafts bring back good memories of monumental architecture, the melancholy of the Renaissance seeps into this no man’s land, pneumatic dispatch breaches communication…. In the public spaces, the forsaken demand equal treatment in the art works by Charlotte Posenenske. This is the opportunity to discover for the first time the works of this important German artist, alongside the art objects of Valentin Carron, Raphael Zarka, Serge Spitzer, and the large shoe of the Iraqi Laith Al-Amiri.

On his way from vernacular iconography to religious symbols, passing through pastiches of public spaces, Valentin Carron interrogates identities through the forms that they celebrate. By invoking these archetypes, the artist doesn’t give in to forgeries, imitation, or even simple reproductions. Seemingly displaced, fragmented and multiplied, his works are either synthetic, serial, or monumental; since they have cashed in on minimalist abstraction, they are freed from a single and unchanging viewpoint.

Here, he uses humour to hijack objects, images, symbols, and their popular usages. Imagery from modern art as well as traditional and contemporary folklore redeploy under a regime of falsehoods, with the candour of a roundabout sculpture. The lanterns evoke either a fanciful Switzerland with mountains and chalets or a heavenly Midwest with wooden sculptures, natural parks, and amusement parks. All these works oscillate between the celebration and the criticism of a romantic and wild country—an elaborate myth that moulds a nation. But even though he plays with notions of authenticity, the handmade, the readymade, and the kitsch aesthetic, Valentin Carron holds out against all ideologies. Or rather, he gives in to all of them: he “poaches” in the matrix of popular consumer culture. Through his works, collective memory becomes a monument that glorifies each of our lives.

[1977] Born in Fully (Switzerland). Lives and works in Martigny (Switzerland).

Link: Valentin Carron at Palais de Tokyo

Artist: Amelie von Wulffen

Venue: Crone, Berlin

Exhibition Title: Bitte keine heiße Asche einfüllen

Date: February 6 – March 6, 2010

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Full gallery of images and link available after the jump.

Images:

Images courtesy of Galerie Crone, Berlin

Link: Amelie von Wulffen at Crone

Artists: Mariana Castillo Deball, Jay Chung & Q Takeki Maeda, Dani Gal

Venue: Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne

Exhibition Title: ars viva 09/10 Geschichte/ History

Date: February 20 – April 4, 2010

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Full gallery of images, press release and link available after the jump.

Images:

Images courtesy of Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne. Photos by Simon Vogel.

Press Release:

The Kölnischer Kunstverein is delighted to be able to present this year’s prestigious ars viva prize exhibition on the theme of History. The Kulturkreis der deutschen Wirtschaft im BDI e.V. (Cultural Circle of German Industry in the BDI, reg. charity) awarded the ars viva prize for visual arts of € 5,000 each to Mariana Castillo Deball (b. 1975), Jay Chung and Q Takeki Maeda (b. 1976/77), and Dani Gal (b. 1975). Three exhibitions (in the Museum Wiesbaden, in the Kölnischer Kunstverein and in the migros museum für gegenwartskunst in Zurich) in the series ars viva are linked to the promotional prize, and these will be accompanied by a catalogue in two languages and an artist’s edition. The three prize-winners were chosen from 44 artists in whose work the investigation of the construction of historical facts is of central importance.

It is striking that all the prize-winning artists engage in their work with the question of the construction of history, how and why it comes to be used today in the political but also the economic sphere. They concentrate in their works on the historical document as the smallest common factor on which, seen from today, agreement can be reached.

Mariana Castillo Deball was born 1975 in Mexico City and studied in Mexico City and Maastricht. In her installations and films the artist often links the dates of historical found objects with fictions of her own, in this way creating a fantastic polyphony in the representation of historical facts. The architecture of an archaeological museum can just as easily become material in her hands as a documented error in economic history. By treating both in her personal aesthetic idiom and skilfully analysing them, she gives the ponderous historical material a lightness that directs the viewer’s gaze to aspects of them that are seemingly peripheral or absurd yet always form part of the construction of history.

Jay Chung and Q Takeki Maeda were born respectively in 1976 in the USA and in 1977 in Japan and studied at Yale, Berkeley, Tokyo and Frankfurt/Main. With conceptual acuteness and a good measure of humour the work of the two artists examines the extent to which the fetishism of today’s consumer world and the universal possibility for anyone to appear in the mass media raises issues of originality and fakery. In doing so the two artists, who are constant performers of their own work, look at how a leading international handbag manufacturer misrepresents historical facts in order to create its own myth, as well as scrutinizing the shoddy construction of reproduction furniture.

Dani Gal was born 1975 in Israel and studied in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Frankfurt/Main and New York. In his work the artist investigates the construction of history in the media in the post-war years. He approaches this principally through sound and by examining the question of how the documentation of a historical event relates to the direct experience of that event. How does sound alter our perception of facts? The artist has worked on the recent history of Israel, for example with a re-enactment of the first television broadcasts by the national TV station, as well as with a quasi documentary approach to the legendary musical producer Lee Perry.

The jury, under the chairmanship of Dr. Arend Oetker, this year consisted of curators Dr. Volker Rattemeyer and Dr. Jörg Daur (Museum Wiesbaden), Kathrin Jentjens and Anja Nathan-Dorn (Kölnischer Kunstverein), Heike Munder (migros museum für gegenwartskunst in Zurich) and Dr. Yilmar Dziewior (Kunsthaus Bregenz), Christiane Mennicke (Kunsthaus Dresden) and six members of the arts committee of the Kulturkreis.

The ars viva exhibition ran from 11.10.2009 to 17.1.2010 at the Museum Wiesbaden. The exhibition then moves to the Kölnischer Kunstverein, after which it will run from12.6. to 15.8.2010 in the migros museum für gegenwartskunst in Zurich.

ars viva 09/10 Geschichte/ History – An exhibition of the award winners visual arts of Kulturkreis der deutschen Wirtschaft im BDI.

Link: “ars viva 09/10″ at Kölnischer Kunstverein

Artist: Daido Moriyama

Venue: Luhring Augustine, New York

Date: February 13 – March 13, 2010

Full gallery of images, press release and link available after the jump.

Images:

Images courtesy of Luhring Augustine, New York

Press Release:

Luhring Augustine is pleased to present its first exhibition featuring the work of Daido Moriyama, one of Japan’s leading figures in photography. Witness to the spectacular changes that transformed postwar Japan, his photographs express a fascination with the cultural contradictions of age-old traditions that persist within modern society. Providing a harsh, crude vision of city life and the chaos of everyday existence, strange worlds, and unusual characters, his work occupies the space between the objective and the subjective, the illusory and the real.

Moriyama takes pictures with a small hand-held camera that enables him to shoot freely while walking or running or through the windows of moving cars. Taken from vertiginous angles or overwhelmed by close-ups, his blurred images are charged with a palpable and frenetic energy that reveal a unique proximity to his subject matter. Snapshots of stray dogs, posters, mannequins in shop windows, and shadows cast into alleys present the beauty and sometimes-terrifying reality of a marginalized landscape. His anonymous and detached approach enables him to capture the “visible present” made up of accidental and uncanny discoveries as he experiences them.

Moriyama emerged as a photographer in the 1960’s at the tail end of the VIVO collective, a revolutionary and highly influential group of Japanese artists who reexamined the conventions of photography during the tumultuous postwar period. William Klein’s loose, Beat style images of New York City in the 1960s also served as a major turning point for Moriyama, who found inspiration in Klein’s free-form photographic style. Taken by these innovative approaches at home and abroad, Moriyama ultimately went on to forge his own radical style.

“Hawaii”, Moriyama’s most recent body of work, was produced over a period of three years and presents his distinct perspective on the daily lives of the people living on the islands of Hawaii and Oahu. Returning to the island five times before feeling prepared to shoot these surroundings, Moriyama’s overall approach is purposeful and considered despite his loose and informal style. The series was recently exhibited at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography and published in a volume by the institution.

Daido Moriyama was born in Osaka in 1938. He has had museum shows around the world including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland, the Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain, Paris and the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography. His work is part of many major public collections such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Centre Pompidou, Paris, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Los Angeles County Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the Getty in Los Angeles.

Link: Daido Moriyama at Luhring Augustine

Welcome to Week in Review, our Sunday round-up of the last 7 days of activity here at Contemporary Art Daily.

This week’s featured exhibitions:

Bernd and Hilla Becher at Konrad Fischer

Oscar Tuazon at Kunsthalle Bern

Ann Veronica Janssens at Alfonso Artiaco

Thomas Eggerer at Daniel Buchholz

Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster at Dia at the Hispanic Society

Tony Just at Sommer & Kohl

Mark Grotjahn at Blum and Poe

Be sure to e-mail us with any tips, observations or complaints and comment on the shows you feel strongly about. Have an excellent week.