GABRIEL OROZCO | GUGGENHEIM BERLIN

Deutsche Guggenheim – “Gabriel Orozco: Asterisms”, 2012

Memories.

Tokens.

Charms.

From a discarded piece of Bubblegum

To a scrap of string….

We are surrounded by a visual collaboration of individual memories and moments either washed up on shore or abandoned, deserted on a Mexican nature reserve. Gabriel Orozco has recycled these forgotten treasures into his own masterpiece that, “can be read both as a critique of current civilization and a poetic topography.” All these little artifacts are brought together perfectly like a constellation of stars in his exhibition Asterisms shown at Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin.

Asterisms – A prominent pattern or group of stars, typically having a popular name but smaller than a constellation.

Deutsche Guggenheim – “Gabriel Orozco: Asterisms”, 2012

“It is a two-part sculptural and photographic installation comprising thousands of items of detritus he gathered at two sites- a playing field near his home in New York where he has collected evidence of activities held there, and a protected coastal biosphere and wildlife reserve in Mexico that is also repository for flows of industrial and commercial waste from across the Pacific Ocean. Presented as a taxonomic study of material, shape, size and color, the exhibition underscores and amplifies Orozco’s subtle practice of subjecting each of his projects to personal idiosyncratic systems.”

“His studio is the world more than anyone, Gabriel Orozco embodies the ideal of the contemporary artist who travels constantly to research and create his work. Over the last thirty years, he has lived in Madrid; Berlin; London; Salvador, Brazil and San Jose, Costa Rica, and currently he divides his time among New York, Paris, and Mexico City. Just as he resists being pinned down to a permanent location, his work also refuses to be classified into the usual categories. While embracing his Mexican heritage, Orozco resists classification as a stereotypical ‘Mexican artist,’ part and parcel of his belief that national identities have become complex and ambiguous in the boundary-upending world we inhabit. The 1962 – born artist discovers the raw material for his poetic sculptures, photographic works, paintings, and found objectsalmost everywhere- in art history, or on the street, or,as in his project for the Deutsche Guggenheim, on the beach of a Mexican nature preserve and sports field in New York.”

- Friedhelm Hutte, Global Head of Art, Deutsche BankAG

Deutsche Guggenheim – “Gabriel Orozco: Asterisms”, 2012

One can always feel an innocent secret hidden within the aesthetics of a shimmering white sea shell. The mystery of the pearl, the age of the the shell itself, and the undiscovered secrets of the ocean hidden within its delicate exterior. These beautiful natural structures are as exciting as the miraculous science behind the lightbulb. Orozco skillfully brings together an exciting oxymoron of nature and manufactured science. The two elements harmonize in color, texture, meaning, and form to become elements of his perfectly positioned installation.

“The individual objects carry narrative connotations. Some of the bottles, for instance, have messages in them. Metal tins appear to contain wartime ammunition or food. Domestic- scale light bulbs once illuminated private homes and fishing boats, and the barnacle- covered buoys demarcated specific marine routes throughout the Pacific. Every item has a back story, a secret that is subsomed by the overwhelming narrative of accumulation and pollution. What does translate is a pronounced awareness of circulation, literally and figuratively. The multifarious items comprising this installation were operative in their respective worlds, their functions defined and their roles unquestioned. Once jettisoned and lost at sea, the objects were literally set in motion, carried along by the tide but with their lack of inherent worth or purpose abundantly clear. When Orozco recuperated them from the coast of Mexico, he put them back into the ecology of exchange but with vastly different conceptual and aesthetic intonations.”

- Friedhelm Hutte, Global Head of Art, Deutsche BankAG

Deutsche Guggenheim – “Gabriel Orozco: Asterisms”, 2012

Orozco’s Asterisms is a perfect collaboration of photographic images, installation, and digital media presenting a “beautiful, seminal, and profoundly human exhibition.” The Guggenheim even gives you the opportunity to see this exhibition every Monday for free so there is no excuse to miss it. Running until the 21st of October, everyone should visit the Mexican artist’s thrillingly colorful and perfectly installed Asterisms.

thanks to: Erin Laurel Haylow

http://blog.artconnect.com/2012/10/19/gabriel-orozco-at-guggenheim-berlin/

THOMAS SARACENO | HANGAR BICOCCA

Tomás Saraceno, On Space Time Foam, 2012. Installation view, HangarBicocca, Milan. Photo: Alessandro Coco. Courtesy Fondazione HangarBicocca, Milan.

Tomás Saraceno
On Space Time Foam

26 October, 2012–3 February, 2013

HangarBicoccaVia Chiese 2, 20126 Milan
Hours: Thursday–Sunday 11am–11pm
Free admission

T +39 02 6611 1573
info@hangarbicocca.org

www.hangarbicocca.org

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Curated by Andrea Lissoni

From 25 October, 2012 to 3 February, 2013 HangarBicocca is presenting On Space Time Foam, a major exhibition project by Tomás Saraceno. Conceived for the “Cubo” of HangarBicocca, On Space Time Foam is a monumental installation, a multi-layer transparent surface accessible to visitors, suspended at a height of 20 metres and covering 1,200 square metres on three levels. This art work that combines artistic and scientific research was made possible through the interaction of skills and experiences in a broad array of fields of knowledge, and thanks to Pirelli’s support.

Saraceno engages with the concept of boundaries, challenging it and conceiving a pioneering installation activated by the visitors’ participation. On Space Time Foam transforms architecture into a living organism, one that breathes thanks to the movements of those who cross it, visualizing the infinite relationships that tie us to space. As the artist explains: “The films constituting the living core of HangarBicocca are constantly altered by climate and the simple movement of people. Each step, each breath, modifies the entire space: it is a metaphor for how our interrelations affect the Earth and other universes.”

On Space Time Foam represents an important moment of the study and experimentation process of Saraceno’s work, ever poised between the quest for the impossible and the scientific rigour. This project will be further developed during his residency at the Center for Art, Science & Technology (CAST)—part of Boston’s prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology—where Saraceno has been invited as the Inaugural Visiting Artist. The installation created for HangarBicocca, will become a floating biosphere to be positioned over the Maldives, made habitable thanks to solar panels and a system to desalinate seawater.

HB Public: a program of events and activitiesFor On Space Time Foam, HangarBicocca has again planned the HB Public program, a calendar of events offered free of charge for all age groups. Thursday evenings are devoted to cinema with Auteur Overview–The films chosen by Tomás Saraceno. The program includes guided tours every Sunday at 5pm in order to discover the permanent installations and current exhibitions, as well as guided tours with the curator Andrea Lissoni.

HB Kids: creative paths and films for childrenHangarBicocca continues its program of activities to introduce children to contemporary art and its languages. The activities are offered on weekends for families and during the week for schools through HB School, HangarBicocca’s new program specifically designed for all grades.

HangarBicocca FoundationHangarBicocca is a foundation chaired by Marco Tronchetti Provera. Pirelli is a charter member and promoter of the Foundation, and is flanked by the Region of Lombardy and the Milan Chamber of Commerce as charter members. The three partners share the vision of culture and contemporary art as a driving force for development. For Pirelli, in particular, HangarBicocca is the natural continuance of a corporate culture that has always made research and innovation a key principle. By sponsoring exhibitions, Pirelli guarantees the international quality of HangarBicocca’s programming, making it possible to produce site-specific installations planned and executed internally, a contribution that makes this art centre a true design laboratory.

Press Office
Angiola Maria Gili – angiola.gili.ex@hangarbicocca.org / T +39 335 6413100
Stefano Zicchieri – stefano.zicchieri.ex@hangarbicocca.org / T +39 334 6160366

 

www.e-flux.com

BARBARA KRUGER

more work here.

© BARBARA KRUGER

Art_prospect

TOM FRIEDMAN | STEPHEN FRIEDMAN GALLERY

Time Out London
London’s Best Sculpture – Five free shows to see this week
8 October 2012

Tom Friedman’s first solo exhibition at the Stephen Friedman Gallery since 2002 features a collection of new works (all 2012), which continue the investigative efforts of the artist-alchemist into the exploration and transformation of the familiar and everyday.

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Tom Friedman is a thinker. The more he looks at something the less clear it becomes. His process is to deconstruct ideas and materials; a physical and conceptual unravelling that ultimately allows for a phenomenological discovery as opposed to the acceptance of a didactic explanation. The resulting works are each self-contained crystallisations that transmute these thought experiments with everyday materials into something unexpected.  

On entering the first of the two Stephen Friedman Gallery spaces divided by the Old Burlington Road the audience encounters a tangle of wires suspended from the ceiling and gently twisting. Stepping around the outside of this freeze-framed explosion, the twists begin to form loose impressions of faces in profile, revealing a crowd in this gathering of lines. This work is a taster, an introduction to the demands that Friedman’s work puts upon the audience, to not trust the authority of our mind over the evidence of our eyes.

In the next room there are more cartoon-like arrangements, which occupy the walls and floor or are hovering somewhere between. Two party balloons, one blue and one green, have been tied to a skeleton and a lectern. Both dangling objects come from a place of education, a hierarchical situation of dry lecturing on subjects from long ago. These balloons enter the scenario to turn it on its head, bringing a much-needed levity to the situation. 

The balloons, skeleton and lectern on closer inspection have all been rendered by the artist in polystyrene, a material that is 98% air, allowing the floating effect to be achieved by the support of a single monofilament. Rather than in the tradition of trompe l’oeil, where there is a hyper-reality, these works have a verisimilitude, operating via the internal logic that helium balloons in children’s stories can lift the heaviest objects. 

On the flipside of the physical forces at play, the work Untitled (Gravity) sees a human head in a white material, approximately life-size, that has been squashed into a lozenge-like shape. The squeezed head with the face on its side could be a model in white tack, which once completed and considered by its creator has been pushed down onto a nearby surface until it can next be of use. 

Across the road the exhibition continues with a more minimal presentation. Untitled (Becoming Unbecoming) sees a wooden cube that through 18 slices across different planes has become a much smaller cube. Each stage of the process exists as a separate object displayed across a shelf. Much like a diagram every action is represented, but rather than a pictorial depiction we are able to fully see the effect on the wood of each incision. In Untitled (Holey Paper) there is again the precision of craftsmanship in the manipulation of material. A paper which at first glance has had a number of circles removed from it to become a very fragile sheet has in fact gone through a process of removal and layering to create an intricate and rhythmic pattern. 

Friedman is influenced by Quantum Physics, his intensive and obsessive practice driven by his desire to distil every idea and material down to its purest essence. The division of this exhibition allows two sides of Friedman to be displayed, on the one side the comic and on the other the deep thinker. These are not mutually exclusive but facets to an intelligent and obsessive mind with an anti-authoritarian streak. 

Tom Friedman

9 October 2012 - 10 November 2012

Review by Beth Bramich

http://www.thisistomorrow.info/

ROTHKO / SUGIMOTO | PACE LONDON

Rothko/Sugimoto: Dark Paintings and Seascapes

Oct 04, 2012 – Nov 17, 2012

6 Burlington Gardens

London W1S 3ET

Tel: +44 (0)20 3206 7600

Mon - Sat 10 to 6

Rothko/Sugimoto: Dark Paintings and Seascapes—the opening exhibition of the Pace Gallery new branch at 6 Burlington Gardens—juxtaposes Mark Rothko’s late black and grey paintings with Hiroshi Sugimoto’s contemporary photographs of bodies of water. The exhibition marks the first private gallery presentation of Rothko’s work in London in nearly fifty years and continues Pace’s five-decade tradition of exhibitions that explore affinities between artists working across decades and mediums.

Dark Paintings and Seascapes pairs eight acrylic paintings by Rothko and eight gelatin silver prints by Sugimoto, revealing two different artistic approaches that arrive at similar conclusions. Rothko’s use of medium as pure abstraction communes with the work of Hiroshi Sugimoto who, decades later, used the medium itself to reconsider photography’s relationship to his viewers’ perception of the world. In addition to exploring the visual dialogue between Rothko’s dark paintings and Sugimoto’s photographs—both characterized by a binary format of black and grey rectangular elements—the pairings mine the philosophical affinities between the two artists, each offering a meditation on universal and cosmological concerns.

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue by Richard Shiff, the Effie Marie Cain Regents Chair in Art and director of the Center for the Study of Modernism at the University of Texas at Austin. “Rothko and Sugimoto think in terms of eras of history and eons of organic life, not the decades of their own lives, ” Shiff writes. “Rothko had directed his art, as Sugimoto does now, to a primal, evolutionary sense of being human. What is true of Rothko and Sugimoto becomes true of all of us when we attend to their experience—if we encounter the limits of human feeling and perception that Rothko’s paintings and Sugimoto’s photographs represent. We then recognize the condition that already constitutes our living … Immersed in an artist’s sea of light—this aesthetic entry into nature, history, and other beings—we become aware of our conscious awareness. ”
The concept for the exhibition originated in 2010, when Hiroshi Sugimoto joined Pace and was introduced to Christopher Rothko, the son of Mark Rothko. Pace has worked with the Rothko family since 1978 and has presented ten exhibitions devoted to the history of the artist’s work.
In preparation for the exhibition, Sugimoto reflected, “For several decades I have created seascapes. Not depicting the world in photographs, I’d like to think, but rather projecting my internal seascapes onto the canvas of the world. Skies now forming bright rectangles, water now melting into dark fluid rectangles. I sometimes think I see a dark horizon cutting across Mark Rothko’s paintings. It’s then I unconsciously realize that paintings are more truthful than photographs and photographs are more illusory than paintings. ”

Painted a year before his death, Rothko’s dark paintings of 1969 represented the first radical break from his signature form in over two decades. He abandoned both the orchestral range and shimmering banks of colour that had defined his earlier work, reducing each painting to two distinct rectangles, one dark and one lighter. Though Rothko had engaged with darkness before—notably in the Seagram paintings of 1958–59 and the commission for the Chapel at the Menil Collection in Houston from 1964–67—in the late work he limited his palette to black and grey, with traces of dark brown, maroon, and blue visible. The paintings are surrounded by a white margin, unique to this series, that isolates the field and emphasizes its flatness.

Though sombre and even elegiac in colour and mood, the dark works relate less to any personal tragedy in Rothko’s life, and more to eternal and depersonalized metaphysical questions. As the critic Brian O’Doherty wrote in his 1985 catalogue essay for Pace’s exhibition of Rothko’s late paintings, “The works contracted to windows of some original darkness. ”

Sugimoto’s Seascapes (begun in 1980) depict bodies of water from the English Channel to the Bay of Sagami, each photographed in the same stark composition of a horizon line dividing the sky and sea. Divided into two rectangles—one dark, one light—the relationship between sea and sky takes on an almost abstract geometry that carries from image to image and ocean to ocean around the world. Like Rothko, Sugimoto conveys a startling range of emotions within a limited vocabulary of black and white tones and a fixed format. Focusing on water and air—the substances that gave rise to life—the works evoke primordial seas and the origins of human consciousness.

Rothko/Sugimoto extends Pace’s ongoing series of two-artist exhibitions that initiate dialogues between artists working across time periods, geography, and mediums, following such significant exhibitions as de Kooning/Dubuffet: The Women (1990) ; Mondrian/Reinhardt: Influence and Affinity (1997) ;Bonnard/Rothko: Color and Light (1997) ; Willem de Kooning and John Chamberlain: Influence and Transformation (2001) ; Dubuffet and Basquiat: Personal Histories (2006) ; Josef Albers/Donald Judd: Color and Form (2007) ; and Ad Reinhardt and Tony Smith: A Dialogue (2008–9).

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at Pace London

until 17 November 2012

“Rothko/Sugimoto: Dark Paintings and Seascapes”, installation views, Pace London. Courtesy of the Pace Gallery

http://moussemagazine.it/rothko-sugimoto-pace/

http://www.pacegallery.com/