Nathan Hylden at Johann König Berlin

Nathan Hylden: Getting There, In Various Order. Until 23 October 2010

Nathan Hylden. Untitled (3010A). 2010

Nathan Hylden. Getting There, In Various Order. 2010

Nathan Hylden. Untitled (2310C). 2010

Nathan Hylden. Untitled (3310S). 2010

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

Johann König Berlin Press Release:

Johann König, Berlin is pleased to present the first solo exhibition of Los Angeles based artist Nathan Hylden in Germany. For the show a wall is build to divide the main gallery in to two spaces. The modified architecture creates an almost mirror doubled situation in which a series of nine large scale paintings are hung. The series is the result of pictorial-technical processes utilizing strict repetition and accumulation principles: During the first step of the process, the artist covers the canvases with a layer of gold paint, the effect of which changes as soon as one moves around the work. The canvases are then stacked into overlapping groups and sprayed with yellow paint over the intersections. Following this, with a stencil, black paint is applied onto each individual canvas creating a striped pattern. This working process allows for each painting to be both the starting point for and the result of the next one. The paintings are simultaneously positive and negative form and thus index of one another as well as autonomous and unique objects. In this way the work becomes an investigation of cause and effect in artistic production.

In the smaller backspace of the gallery, Hylden is showing a second series of works, which can be seen as a reflection of the work in the main space. Untreated aluminum sheets are screen-printed with the image of a blank canvas. Again all the works are serially connected. The screen-print series presents blankness as image, neutralizing the differences between the representational and abstract. Gilles Deleuze states: “modern painting is invaded and besieged by photographs and clichés that are already lodged on the canvas before the painter even begins to work.” The image of the blank canvas is a presentation of emptiness, which is also completely charged with meaning. The artist then juxtaposes painted canvases of the same dimensions to the prints, so that the relationship between image and material is complicated. Each image is the corporeal shadow of the one of the previous and the next.

Hylden raises questions of the circumstances of an image and its material manifestation as the subject of his art. To achieve this, he develops a syntax following the conceptual tradition. Painting is a medium traditionally linked with the idea of uniqueness. In Nathan Hylden’s work it is used within a reflection of seriality of art based on mechanical repetition and an efficiency in the materials selected: unmixed, standard metallic paint, fluorescent spray paint, stencils, untreated painting surfaces. Each individual work is closely related to a series or a body of works resulting from actions carried out through a long period of time. Through the daily activity in the studio the repetitive gestures become the connecting element between all works. By showing the series in the exhibition “Still Now Again”, the artistic process freezes for a moment and thus reaches its culmination. A poster showing a canvas printed with the exhibition dates further emphasizes this temporal aspect.

Today I made Nothing at Elizabeth Dee

Today I Made Nothing: until 18th September 2010

Duncan Campbell, Alejandro Cesarco, Jay Chung & Q Takeki Maeda, Tyler Coburn, Harun Farocki, Liam Gillick, Renée Green, Sam Lewitt, Jonathan Monk,Virginia Overton, Josef Strau, Mika Tajima

Joseph Strau Untitled, 2010 Mixed media installation with floor lamp and two paintings Dimensions variable

Virginia Overton Untitled (tow rope), 2010 Lumber, tow rope, screws and pastel Dimensions variable

Today I Made Nothing, Installation view

Jonathan Monk The Sound Of Music (A Record With the Sound Of Its Own Making), 2007 Vinyl, outer sleeve, black and white photographic print Sleeve dimensions: 12.25 x 12.375 inches (31.1 x 31.4 cm) Print size: 12 x 12 inches (30.5 x 30.5 cm) AP from an edition of 50 Published in 2007 by RITE Editions, San Francisco, CA

All images: Elizabeth Dee New York

Gallery press release:

While many people are going on vacation and galleries are wrapping up their summer shows, Elizabeth Dee Gallery is pleased to present Today I Made Nothing, a group exhibition that considers the relationship between work and leisure, non-productivity and the negation of work, in a contemporary context in which people are perpetually available and continually securing their economy. Taking its title from the work of the late Russian writer and poet Daniil Kharms, whose own brand of aesthetic refusal ran afoul of Stalin, the exhibition substitutes his proclamation’s verb, replacing writing with working.

From factory workers to the labor movement, the Art Workers’ Coalition to the proliferation of freelance professionals, artists’ practices continue to be associated with varying forms of labor. But even with the rise of immaterial labor and the expansion of the periods of time during which one is potentially working, the amount of time spent at work does not have a direct corollary with increased levels of production: working less can actually result in getting more done. With times of production and research (or conception), becoming increasingly indistinguishable, the culture worker is often working when it might appear otherwise, even when at a casual lunch meeting or exhibition opening. Given that this process can also be reversible, repeated, or reduced to a set of instructions, art practice can be further separated from the act of labor—perhaps even positioned in direct opposition to the very idea of work—as a kind of non-productivity that might best align itself with one aspect of art’s history: that of doing nothing.

Commencing chronologically with Harun Farocki’s “Workers Leaving the Factory”—a piece comprised of film excerpts spanning the entire history of cinema, each depicting people at the conclusion of their work day and leaving the site of their labor—the works in the exhibition employ a number of pre-existing or found materials, be they texts, films, art works, advertisements or office furniture. Tracing different lineages and histories of production, the works move to the gallery from the artist’s studio, factory, recording studio or publishing house, often combining these materials and negating their previous use-value so as to render them comically or absurdly dysfunctional, much as Kharms wrote stories that refused to function as traditional, linear narratives.

The question then is how do we take the models from the past and improve upon them, be they ones developed in the 1960s and presented by Robert Morris, Jean-Luc Godard or Herman Miller, or Guy Debord’s even earlier declaration “Ne travaillez jamais,” then echoed by the Italian Autonomists? By investigating the value of work and questioning what constitutes it today, can we develop ideas about how we might best replace the present post-Fordist neoliberal model with a better one, reclaiming both the governance of time as well as work itself?

Today I Made Nothing is an exhibition in two parts, the second installment opening at Front Desk Apparatus (www.frontdeskapparatus.com) in September. Additionally, the exhibition is accompanied by the first phase of The Library Project, presented at Elizabeth Dee by Front Desk Apparatus, an initiative that focuses on editorial creation, independent publications and the position of writing and design in contemporary practice. In a filing cabinet in the gallery’s office space, a selection of readings pertaining to the exhibition, aims to employ the office context as a framework that acknowledges, uncovers and excavates the library’s potential to generate concrete possibilities in the form of “living” research and knowledge production.

JUNKO KOSHINO + GO YAYANAGI at TOKYO GALLERY BEIJING

Junko Koshino + Go Yayanagi: Genre Crossing. Until 9th September

Tokyo Gallery Beijing press release:

Tokyo Gallery + BTAP (Beijing) is pleased to present “Genre Crossing”, an exhibition by fashion designer Junko Koshino and contemporary artist Go Yayanagi starting on August 8th (Sun).

Junko Koshino was born in Osaka. She enrolled in the design department at Bunka Fashion College, and at the age of 19 became the youngest ever recipient of the So-en prize, a prestigious award for emerging designers. After graduating, she showed her work for the first time at Paris Fashion Week in 1978. Since then, she has exhibited her collections in various cities and countries worldwide, including New York (at the Metropolitan Museum of Art), Vietnam, Cuba and Myanmar. In Beijing, Koshino previously staged the largest fashion show in China at the Beijing Hotel in 1985, a sports and fashion show at the city’s Workers’ Indoor Arena in 1988, and the “Koshino Junko Design” exhibition at the Museum of Chinese History in 1992. Currently, Koshino is active in a wide variety of fields, creating stage costumes for operas and musicals, sports uniforms and designs for interiors, in addition to her diverse work as an active proponent of international cultural exchange. Her efforts were recognized in 2006 when she was awarded the Order of the Star of Italian Solidarity by the Italian government, and again in 2008 when she was appointed a Yokoso! Japan ambassador by the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism for her contributions towards the promotion of Japan as a tourist destination.　She was also designated an ambassador for the Shanghai World Expo by the city of Shanghai this year.

Go Yayanagi was born in Obihiro, Hokkaido in 1933. After graduating from Obihiro Agricultural High School in 1951, he traveled to Sao Paolo, Brazil in 1957, where he held a solo exhibition of his work at the city’s Museum of Modern Art. Since then Yayanagi has shown his work actively in various other countries and traveled widely around the world to places like Africa, Singapore, Manila and Hong Kong. In 1965 he moved to Paris and studied copperplate printmaking for 3 years with the master printer S. W. Hayter at his Atelier 17. Yayanagi has presented his work at numerous exhibitions both abroad and in Japan. He was selected to represent Japan at the 11th Sao Paolo International Biennial in 1971. In Japan, he showed his work at the “Geijutsu e no Chosen” exhibition held at the Ikeda Museum of 20th Century Art in 1981, and “Distant Cosmology: 40 Years of Go Yayanagi,” held at the Hokkaido Obihiro Museum of Art in 1992. Working across a diverse range of fields including oil painting, printmaking, murals for public buildings and design, Yayanagi is an artist who continues to produce work at an international level.

The collaborative relationship between Koshino and Yayanagi began when they met at Yayanagi’s solo show “A day, a lifetime; the vestiges of 365 days. And now,” held at Tokyo Gallery + BTAP in June 2009. By incorporating patterns taken from Yayanagi’s prints into her clothing designs, Koshino has been creating collaborative works that have been unveiled at various fashion shows and events, including “Junko Koshino Collection: A Moment” (Grand Hyatt, Tokyo) and “Junko Koshino Beijing Fashion Show 25th Anniversary” (Great Hall of the People, Beijing).

This exhibition showcases pieces from Koshino’s collection that resulted from her collaboration with Yayanagi, as well as a selection of Yayanagi’s own paintings and prints. Yayanagi’s print works dating from the 1970s have been transformed into textile designs and given a new lease of life in three-dimensional form. This mutual, effortless “genre crossing” between the realms of art and fashion, previously distinguished from each other as separate disciplines, represents a new, innovative direction in the careers of these two accomplished creators.

We hope you take this opportunity to view the exhibition and look forward to your visit.

Tags: Exhibitions, Painting

Public Interest presented by LACE

Public Interest: Painted Over/Under, Kim Schoenstadt

PAINTED OVER/UNDER: PARTS 1-4

Kim Schoenstadt’s Painted Over/Under Parts 1-4 is a year-long project based on the mismatched color patterning created by “graffiti maintenance” on freeway retaining walls and other open walls in the city. Parts 1-3 will incorporate guest curators Les Figues Press, Jens Hoffman and Erin Cullerton who will invite writers, artists and architects to create drawings in shifts on the walls in LACE’s rear gallery. With each part of the project, works will be written and/or drawn onto the walls, then painted over with Schoenstadt’s color palette, creating a layered, abstracted painting defined by the shapes of past projects, offering a new starting point for the next group, and so on. Prior to each “painting out,” Schoenstadt will apply tape on the large wall drawing to preserve portions of the work below. Part 4 will reveal the complete drawing, which will be constructed out of fragments of the project’s history.

Public Interest: State of the Union, Robert Ransick

State of the Union

This 31-print installation by New York-based artist Robert Ransick focuses on the thirty-one U.S. states whose voters have amended their constitution to define marriage as a union between a man and a woman. Using the official voter results and ballot measure text copyedited by hand, Ransick creates an emotionally and politically charged installation in response to this hot button issue. Using material that is simultaneously of public record and highly personal, State of the Union is a poetic call to action and a necessary record of this shifting and contentious moment in history. Robert Ransick is LACE’s second Visual Artists Network artist-in-residence and will be in Los Angeles for the week leading up to the Public Interest kick-off.

Ultra Marine, murmer’s Heather Roberge

Ultra Marine

LACE commissioned murmur’s Heather Roberge, a Los Angeles architect and educator, to create an immersive environment of iridescent color. Suspended layers of shimmering fabric will bathe visitors in color rendered as luminous vapor. Ultra Marine will serve as LACE’s public plaza for performances and workshops throughout the summer, and act as an attractor to draw people through the space and encourage various forms of gathering and relaxation.

Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions

Thomas Struth at Zurich Kunsthaus

Thomas Struth: Photographs 1978-2010. Until 12th September 2010

Zurich Kunsthaus press release:

Since the early 1980s the Düsseldorf-based photographer Thomas Struth has developed a distinctive approach and an intriguing repertoire of subjects whilst remaining alert to the particular possibilities of the photographic medium. Working in an age characterized by an overload of highly reworked and mediated imagery, Struth has invested photography with renewed intensity and integrity.

The exhibition surveys Struth’s work over three decades and includes extended groups from each of the families or series which make up the body of work: black and white photographs from European, Asian and American cities, family portraits, large-scale colour prints made in dense jungles and forests, inside some of the world’s great museums and places of worship such as temples and cathedrals. It culminates in a major new body of work presented in Zurich for the first time. Bringing together almost one hundred works, the exhibition is the most wide-ranging survey of Struth’s work to date and highlights the complexity of his way of seeing and picturing the world.

Andreas Schulze at Sprueth Magers Berlin

Andreas Schulze: until 21st August 2010

Sprueth Magers press release

Monika Sprüth and Philomene Magers are pleased to present for the first time an exhibition by Andreas Schulze in Berlin. It follows upon the large survey exhibitionINTERIEUR. Werkschau Andreas Schulze at the Sammlung Falckenberg in Hamburg during the early summer of 2010 which will be shown from September 5 at the Leopold-Hoesch-Museum in Düren. At Sprüth Magers Berlin, Schulze is presenting the installation Untitled (Dresden), 1997, and new paintings.

At the center of the installation is the model of a miniature city from Schulze’s collection of model trains. The walls of the exhibition room are covered with wallpaper and surround the model like a landscape; posters advertise the tourist attractions of Saxony and Dresden. With this model, however, it is a matter not of a true-to-reality representation, but of a fictional cityscape which is drawn from personal and narrated memories, information conveyed by the media, and associational set-pieces.

Similarly as in other works, Andreas Schulze is concerned here with an approach to reality, with the possibilities of its representation and the emphasizing of the artificiality of this depiction. Harald Falckenberg offers the following comments upon the significance of Andreas Schulze as an artist of our era:

The art of Andreas Schulze, aged fifty-four, was and is uncontemporary in the best sense of the word. He has never paid attention to the trends in the operating system of art. Schulze paints things, strangely large-formated, color-intensive motifs with ornaments, globes, square and rectangular forms, mostly with a perspectival orientation. And he designs spaces, living rooms with furniture, lamps, carpets and dinnerware. These are views into an old-fashioned and naive world of German gemütlichkeit, a design quite removed from modernist concepts.

Andreas Schulze was of no concern either to the theory-oriented art of the nineteen-seventies, with its focus on social relevance, or to the politically oriented Context Art of the nineteen-nineties. His time as the inventor of new pictorial worlds seemed to have come during the nineteen-eighties when, under the slogan ‘hunger for pictures’, there was a renaissance of painting. It was a matter of the Mülheimer Freiheit, of the Jungen Wilden and, on an international level, of the art of the Transavanguardia. Andreas Schulze collaborated with the artists of the Mülheimer Freiheit and participated in their exhibitions. But artistically he remained an outsider, and personally a maverick. The Neo-Expressionist attitude of those years, with its inclination towards hedonism and self-dramatization, was not for him. All the way to today, he has remained true to ‘things’, to his convictions, also with regard to the Neo-Romantic tendencies of the painting of the last ten years. People have no place in his oeuvre.

Andreas Schulze stands in high esteem as an artist’s artist among colleagues from George Condo, Fischli & Weiss, Thomas Grünfeld and Gary Hume to Gert and Uwe Tobias, as well as with exhibition organizers such as Lynne Cooke, Zdenek Felix, Robert Fleck, Udo Kittelmann, Kasper König and Ralph Rugoff. His spaces recall the Merzbau, the refuge which the artist Kurt Schwitters described as the cathedral of his erotic misery. The Merzbau has become a model for young contemporary art from Jonathan Meese to Gregor Schneider. It is a matter of forms for the conduct of life which do not oppose society but instead create alternatives which are ultimately models of escapism.

The exhibition in Hamburg was entitled INTERIEUR. This stands for the inner viewpoint of an artist who creates art in order to provide himself with both furnishings and orientation, and it designates the peculiar, ludicrous objects of his surroundings. Andreas Schulze has created for himself his own scurrilous world, an artistic house for his personal life. With its references, so typical for postmodernism, to such artists of the avant-garde as Donald Judd, Richard Long, Cy Twombly and Andy Warhol, his art has for a long time been considered to be painting in the traditional sense. But this searching after clues, particularly when it is conducted with seriousness, does not lead any further. Andreas Schulze deconstructs interconnections with the intention – expressed sometimes in playful merriness, sometimes with ill nature – of winding back to normality the exalted significance of his renowned predecessors. Avant-gardist art, according to Andreas Schulze in an interview, oscillates between the extremes of refined intellectuality and coarse banality. He himself is instead concerned with ‘bourgeois averageness’, with Meissner porcelain instead of the Brillo box or the Campbell’s can.

It is time to reconsider and to comprehend Andreas Schulze as a conceptional painter engaged in the design of a dadaistically marked program for living. From his model Kurt Schwitters, born like he himself in Hannover, comes this observation: “I evaluate sense with regard to nonsense. I prefer nonsense, but that is an entirely personal matter. This formulation also stands for the attitude of Andreas Schulze” (Harald Falckenberg, 2010)

Andreas Schulze was born in 1955 in Hannover, he studied at the Gesamthochschule Kassel and at the Staatliche Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where he is active as a professor for painting. In 1983 Monika Sprüth opened her gallery with a solo exhibition by Andreas Schulze. Important group exhibitions could be seen at the MoMA in New York (1984), at the Tate in London (1987), at the Kunstforeningen in Copenhagen, and at the Triennale in Venice (1997). Works of the artist are to be found in numerous private and institutional collections.

A publication on Andreas Schulze’s work will appear in September 2010 with essays by Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen, Margit Brehm, Susanne Rennert / Michael Trier and Harald Falckenberg, an artist’s conversation with Heinz-Norbert Jocks, along with statements about the artist by such artists as George Condo, Fischli & Weiss, Thomas Grünfeld, Gary Hume as well as by Lynne Cooke, Zdenek Felix, Robert Fleck, Udo Kittelmann, Kasper König and Ralph Rugoff.

The Crystal Hypothesis at GAMeC

Images courtesy of GAMeC, Bergamo.  Photos by Jacopo Menzani.

GAMeC Press Release:

From June 9th to July 25th 2010 GAMeC – Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo will host in its SpazioZero the exhibition The Crystal Hypothesis, curated by Yoann Gourmel and Élodie Royer, winners of the 5th Edition of the Premio Lorenzo Bonaldi per l’Arte – EnterPrize.

Proposed by Florence Derieux (Director FRAC Champagne-Ardenne), Yoann Gourmel and Élodie Royer were chosen in June 2009 by an international panel composed of Iwona Blazwick (Director Whitechapel Gallery, London), Rein Wolfs (Artistic Director Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel) and Giacinto Di Pietrantonio (Director GAMeC, Bergamo).

THE PRIZE

The prize was presented for the first time in 2003 by GAMeC with the support of the Bonaldi family as a result of the family’s wish to commemorate Lorenzo Bonaldi’s passion for art and collecting. The prize is the only one of its kind: its aim is to search out talented curators under the age of 30 and to mount the winner’s proposed exhibition. The purpose of the prize is to draw attention to the importance of the curator in the international art field and to encourage and support the talent of a young curator at an extremely dynamic moment of his or her professional career.

The idea behind this prize was to create not a competitive situation, but an opportunity for professional growth and comparison. This is why, in 2005, the idea arose to accompany the award ceremony with a biennial convention, Qui Enter Atlas – International Symposium of Emerging Curators.

THE PROJECT

The project of Yoann Gourmel and Élodie Royer brings together works by ten contemporary artists who deal with various aspects and ways of seeing in order to evoke – sometimes in an anachronistic manner – the way we look at things today, the way we look at the present time. If the dazzle can be defined as a lack of discernment of reality, we might say that the ultra-saturated era of disposable knowledge and images of all sorts in which we live today causes a collective and contemporary dazzle. In this sense, this repeated dazzle causes a sort of blindness when we think of our relationship to the present day. However this blindness, this forced but necessary loss of sight, which compels us to look back to the past, might also enable the emergence and the precision of our path ahead.

This exhibition is also based on hypotheses developed by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben in a short essay entitled What is the contemporary?1 in which he defines the contemporary as “the singular relationship with one’s own time to which one adheres by keeping one’s distance” – a definition that he further develops through various (physical, poetic, phenomenological) processes related to sight and vision. Indeed, based on neurophysiology of vision, Agamben explains that the darkness can therefore not be considered a mere absence of light, something like a non-vision, but the result of an activity. In this sense, perceiving the darkness of an era is not a form of inertia or passivity.

As he finally suggests, “contemporary is the one whose eyes directly receive the beams of darkness that come from his time.” Looking at the darkness would then be a way to avoid being blinded by the lights of our time. Artists from all times have regularly taken a step back into the past to confront the present and to anticipate the future.

The exhibition title comes from the “Iceland spar”, a variety of calcite that demonstrates double refraction: an object placed behind an Iceland crystal appears double, slightly shifted with respect to the original. This double refraction may be attributed to a temporal phenomenon: if the image of this object appears double, it is because light rays traveling through the crystal split into fast and slow beams; one of the images is older than the other and the rays – which are affected by the speed – are bent at different angles as they exit the crystal.

In a way, this hypothesis of the co-existence of a double temporality echoes the works presented in the exhibition in which certain anachronisms seem to exist to better express the present of which they are a part of. The blind and the dazzled figures (Julien Crépieux, Benoît Maire), the standards of representation (Isabelle Cornaro, Ryan Gander), the circulation of images (Mark Geffriaud, Clément Rodzielski), the distance from which we look at things of the past (Ulla von Brandenburg, Adrian Ghenie, Bojan Šarčevič) are some of the elements that surround this exhibition and the works in it. The exhibition will be accompanied by a 12″ LP vinyl edited and produced for the exhibition by Bruno Persat including songs, sounds and texts suggested by the artists in connection with the works on display.