GALLERY WEEKEND | BERLIN

Gallery Weekend Berlin May 1-3, 2015

Once again, the national and international art world is getting ready for the eleventh year of Gallery Weekend Berlin. On the first weekend of May, 47 of Berlin’s leading galleries – most of which you know from abc 2014 – will open their doors with new exhibitions showcasing established as well as emerging artists.
 

Galerie NEU
Photo: Marco Funke

Challenging the notion of the modernist white cube, this year’s participating galleries present works in unlikely settings ranging from industrial warehouses and boiler rooms to private apartments or office buildings. Diverse locations mirroring the multifaceted art scene in Berlin will become sites of engagement, bringing together all actors of the contemporary art market.

See the full list of participating galleries and the program of special events at www.gallery-weekend-berlin.com.
 

ED ATKINS | PERFORMANCE CAPTURE

ED ATKINS: PERFORMANCE CAPTURE
25 APR - 26 APR 2015


With: Ed Atkins Beatrix Ruf, David Raymond Conroy, Gil Leung, Andy Holden 

en Frances Morgan.

Time: 3 – 5.30 pm, doors open at 2.30 pm
Location Teijin auditorium, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam 

Language English Admission Entrance fee to the museum + € 2.50 

cover charge Details Sold out

Ed Atkins,
 Ribbons 2014
. Three channel 4:3 in 16:9 HD video with three 4.1 

channel surround soundtracks. Courtesy the artist and Cabinet, London.

Ed Atkins,
 Ribbons 2014
. Three channel 4:3 in 16:9 HD video with three 

4.1 channel surround soundtracks. Courtesy the artist and Cabinet, London.

Ed Atkins,
 Ribbons 2014
. Three channel 4:3 in 16:9 HD video with three 

4.1 channel surround soundtracks. Courtesy the artist and Cabinet, London.

Accompanying the exhibition Recent Ouija, the Stedelijk Museum presents a two-day program of music, talks, performances, and screenings devised by the artist Ed Atkins. The two afternoons will reflect on salient ideas drawn from Atkins’s work. Corralled under interpretations of the event’s title, “Performance Capture” brings together thoughts on performance, identity, and representation, and explores how they might be fundamentally recast by their mediation through contemporary technologies.

In the context of Atkins’s work and the weekend program, “Performance Capture” should also be understood metaphorically, as a poetic term alluding to the ways in which performances of self can be recuperated or possessed by external forces, and how these often hidden political processes could be productively re-performed and made visible through performance capture technology, as a kind of therapy.

Ed Atkins explains what the program is about: “The title … is taken from one of the names given to the computerized, three-dimensional technique of mapping the movements of a performing body for the express purpose of animating a computer-generated figure. This interplay between the figurative and the literal will thread throughout the “Performance Capture” program, presenting opportunities to make manifest subjects and sensations that are commonly rendered invisible, magical, or hysterical. The disappearing of physical bodies and their particular feelings will be resisted in favor of a material, immanent return to the matter of our mortal bodies”.

An “open-mic” will be present throughout the weekend – a provision for posing questions, singing songs, inviting interruptions and irruptions. A bar will also be installed in the auditorium for the duration of the program: drinking – manifest, material intoxication – will be encouraged. For two days, the auditorium will be a site for desire and fantasy, a hospitable talk show for caricature, karaoke, mercy and surrogacy – of gratuitous performance. Invited speakers will be announced soon.
MORE ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Ed Atkins is known as one of the pioneers of a contemporary art founded in digitized life: a life always-already inflected by the internet, computers, abstract relations. In his practice, Atkins makes extensive use of cutting edge digital technologies of production and display: computer generated imagery, surround soundtracking and extensive digital compositing all function as emphatic, hysterical caricatures of emotional affects and frustrated desires. Atkins has exhibited at a host of international venues, including Tate Britain (2011), MoMA PS1 (2013), Kunsthalle Zürich (2013) and the Serpentine Galleries in London (2014). The exhibition Ed Atkins: Recent Ouija will be on view at the Stedelijk Museum until May 31, 2015.

David Raymond Conroy lives and works in London. His practice spans visual arts and performance, with a particular emphasis on how self-identified forms of representation might be properly conveyed and understood – as sincere, as true, as in any way sufficient. Most recently, during a residency at Camden Arts Centre (2014-2015), Conroy produced a series of essays, stories and presentations that explored issues of consumption, production, privilege and responsibility. Other recent projects include Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, a stage play with Andy Holden, presented at Arnolfini, Bristol and the ICA, London (2012-13); a solo exhibition L’homme qui voulait savoir at GP & N Vallois, Paris (2012) and the Waterfalls Pavilion curated by Charles Aubin at the Biennial de Belleville, Vivarium Studio, Paris (2012). Conroy holds an MA in Printmaking from the Royal College of Art, London.

Gil Leung is a writer and artist living and working in Brussels and London. Leung and Atkins’ worked together previously on their performance A Methodology for a Phosphorescent Screen at the Special Starry Event in conjunction with the exhibition The Starry Rubric Set at Wysing Art Centre, Cambridgeshire (2012). Also, Leung contributed her piece Pin Pricks to the publication of Ed Atkins & Patrick Ward: Defining Holes (CC Tobačna 001, Ljubljana, 2012). She was program manager at LUX, London (an international arts agency for the support of artists’ moving image practice) and editor of Versuch journal. Recent projects include A Bright Night, with Serpentine Galleries and LUX. Currently, she is resident at Wiels Contemporary Art Center, Brussels. Leung holds an MA in Aesthetics and Art Theory from the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, London

Frances Morgan is deputy editor of The Wire and a freelance journalist. She writes about music, sound, film and gender, and their particular intertwinement; for Performance Capture, particular emphasis will be made on the role technologies (of language and display; the audio visual) have in mediating, for better or ill, experiences of performance. The former editor and publisher of Plan B magazine, Morgan is a regular contributor to Sight & Sound and currently writes its monthly Soundings column on music, sound and moving image. She regularly hosts The Wire's radio show Adventures In Sound And Music on Resonance FM.

- See more at: http://www.stedelijk.nl/en/calendar/forum/ed-atkins-performance-capture#sthash.ADecTxTF.dpuf

IAN BREAKWELL | ANTHONY REYNOLDS GALLERY

IAN BREAKWELL
IMPORTANT WORKS FROM THE 60’S AND 70’S

21 JANUARY – 21 FEBRUARY 2015

IAN BREAKWELL, Visual Text No.1, 1968-69
ink, collage and polythene on board
4 x 139 cm

30 years ago, on April Fools Day, Anthony Reynolds Gallery presented the first exhibition in its cavernous Old Street basement space: New Work by Ian Breakwell. The series of monumental paintings on display were far from what his many followers anticipated; but then Breakwell was an artist whose championship of the extraordinary in the ordinary was always unexpected. As the late, great commentator Tom Lubbock put it: ‘he was a painter, diarist, film-maker, fiction writer, photographer, and broadcaster. His work was a series of one-offs and each one is a surprise...a heartening affirmation of unfathomable ongoing ordinariness’. Breakwell was indeed all these things and more, a great polymath artist with a roll-call of heart-and-soul-mates that included James Joyce and Robert Walser, Schubert and Thelonius Monk, Goya and Magritte, Ingmar Bergman and Buster Keaton, and who, in the words of Felicity Sparrow, was ‘the champion of the underdog. The unseen, the unloved. And the unlovely.’

Breakwell was and is a unique and hugely influential figure, one of the greatest exponents of the visual language of word and text. Surrealism, Letterism, Fluxus, Happenings, Systems, chance and order are all part of his make-up; even the Kitchen Sink School, but without any of the turgidity. Out of these and his working class Midlands background Breakwell fashioned a brilliant and utterly singular oeuvre. There is certainly a dark side to his work which frequently verges on the repellent but its essential humanity and surreal humour always triumphs. His texts and images weave together the slight with the profound, digging nuggets of gold out of the mud of the everyday. ‘Reassuringly familiar starting points, i.e. clichés, are the deliberately chosen basis of most of my artwork, whether writings, drawings, paintings, films or videotapes. Then the way is clear to test and turn that familiarity into unexpected forms which hopefully disturb complacency.’

Ten years after his death in 2005, Anthony Reynolds Gallery is presenting a selection of major works from the first two decades of Breakwell’s career. The exhibition includes the most comprehensive expression of Breakwell’s major diary pieces, The 1974 Diary. This massive work has not been seen complete in London since his ICA exhibition in 1977. The show also includes important and rarely seen works from the 60’s, among them the apparently gruesome diptych, The Kill (1969) and the remarkable Description of a Picture (1968) which is a long distance forerunner of countless descriptive ‘word pictures’ of more recent years. Further exhibits include two rare studies for the Walking Man Diary of 1975-78 (Tate Collection) a unique large-scale work derived from an early performance piece, Buffet Car News (1967), and a series of three sexually challenging collages from 1971.

Breakwell’s last major work, BC/AD, is included in the exhibition Self: Image and Identity: Self-Portraiture from Van Dyck to Louise Bourgeois at the Turner Contemporary in Margate from 24 January to 10 May.


Please be advised this exhibition contains images of a sexually explicit nature.

FOR FURTHER INFORMATION AND IMAGES PLEASE CONTACT DANIEL@ANTHONYREYNOLDS.COM 

Anthony Reynolds Gallery
60 Great Marlborough Street
London
W1F 7BG
United Kingdom
EuropeT: +44 (0) 207 439 2201
F: +44 (0) 207 439 1869
M: 
W: www.anthonyreynolds.com

VICTOR MOSCOSO | ANDREW EDLIN GALLERY

Victor Moscoso Psychedelic Drawings, 1967-1982 Curated by Norman Hathaway & Dan Nadel March 6 - April 25, 2015 © Victor Moscoso Special lecture with Victor Moscoso & Norman Hathaway: Thursday, March 5th, 6:30-8:30 PM See below for more details Opening reception: Friday, March 6th, 6–8 PM Andrew Edlin Gallery is excited to announce a retrospective of drawings by Victor Moscoso, one of the pre-eminent graphic artists of the 20th century, and widely renowned for his 1960s psychedelic posters and comics. The gallery will publish a 96-page catalog to accompany the exhibition. The artist will attend the opening reception. This exhibition is the first to present the full range of Moscoso’s drawings for posters and comics, including original renderings for his renowned cover of Zap Comix #4 (1969), the Hocus Pocus story, posters for The Doors and The Who, and other seminal published editions. These works, executed as production art for printed pieces, reveal Moscoso’s dedication to expert draftsmanship in the service of graphics, as well as a sure and graceful approach to drawing everything from dinosaurs to spaceships to humans. Victor Moscoso’s impact on the visual culture of the psychedelic era belies his modernist training (he studied with Josef Albers at Yale in the late 1950s), which he used to delineate images, posters and comics that explore geometric space, animation, and cartoon icons. In 1966, while living in San Francisco, Moscoso began designing posters for rock shows in the city, and by 1967 had developed his signature style, in which opposite hues of the same intensity sit next to each other to create a visual “vibration” effect and lettering is designed for its form instead of function. Moscoso’s lettering was all hand-drawn; his approach to letterforms gave negative space as much weight as the positive. This spatial confusion, along with color vibrations and Moscoso’s mysterious imagery, made his work instantly recognizable. Between 1967 and 1970, Moscoso designed over one hundred posters for everyone from the Grateful Dead to Jimi Hendrix to Alan Ginsberg. In doing so, he revolutionized the worlds of graphic design, typography, and rock'n'roll imagery. In 1968, Moscoso was invited by Robert Crumb to join him in Zap Comix. Moscoso’s abstract and lyrical comics debuted in issue 2 and he has remained a driving force of the Zap collective through to its final iteration, a 2014 “Complete Zap Comix” box set that sold out immediately upon its release. Victor Moscoso was born in La Coruña, Spain in 1936, and moved to Brooklyn in 1940. He attended the New York High School of Industrial Art and then Cooper Union and Yale University, where he earned a BA in 1959. He completed a master's degree at the San Francisco Art Institute in 1961. Moscoso, who resides in Marin County, California, has also completed album covers, billboards, animations and posters for artists including Jerry Garcia, Primus, Herbie Hancock, The Who and many others. His work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art (New York), The Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum (New York), the Victoria and Albert Museum (London), The Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Library of Congress (Wash DC), the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Louvre (Paris), the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), and the Tate Modern (London). Norman Hathaway is a graphic designer, design historian, and lecturer. He is the author of Overspray: Riding High with the Kings of California Airbrush Art and co-author (with Dan Nadel) of Electrical Banana: Masters of Psychedelic Art and Dorothy and Otis: Designing the American Dream. Dan Nadel is a writer and curator whose most recent exhibition What Nerve: Alternative Figures in American Art, 1960 to the Present was presented at the RISD Museum in Providence, RI. He is the author of books including Art Out of Time: Unknown Comics Visionaries and co-author (with Norman Hathaway) of Electrical Banana: Masters of Psychedelic Art and Dorothy and Otis: Designing the American Dream. ***** Type Confusion & Color Aggressionwith Victor Moscoso and Norman Hathaway Special guest lecture open to the public Thursday, March 5th, 6:30 - 8:30 PM The Rose Auditorium, Cooper Union 41 Cooper Square (at East 7th Street) New York, NY 10003

Edlin Gallery

OTTO PIENE | ARNDT

OTTO PIENE Solo exhibition at ARNDT Berlin March 24 - April 18, 2015  Opening | Saturday | March 21, 2015 | from 3 - 6pm | at ARNDT Berlin  ARNDT Berlin is pleased to present its inaugural solo exhibition by Otto Piene. Otto Piene, co-founder of the renowned ZERO group, was a visionary artist of the twentieth century avant-garde who reinvented his multidisciplinary practice over a career spanning five decades. Founded in 1957 along with fellow contemporary Heinz Mack, and later joined by Günther Uecker in 1961, the ZERO group was a European art movement established in the aftermath of World War II. Seeking new beginnings, with idealistic and utopian ambition, the group strove to produce a radical and optimistic global art that dissolved boundaries and embraced elemental forces of nature. Embodying a newly defined artistic freedom, the ZERO group worked across a wide range of media, exploring ideas of light, space, movement, structure, colour and art’s experiential possibilities. Exhibitions were often presented in the form of immersive installations employing painting, film, kinetic sculpture and performance. Such conceptual underpinnings were maintained within Piene’s own practice manifest in the interconnection between art, nature, science and technology. Known for his process driven, experimental approach, Piene aimed to produce genre-defying works that investigated notions of ephemerality, synaesthesia – the blending of the senses – and aesthetic experience. Early in his career Piene created letter reliefs, perforated grid-light boxes and grid pictures that offered resistance to light. At the end of the 1950s Piene developed his first smoke drawings and mechanised light sculptures. In 1957 Piene created the Grid Pictures – stencilled paintings made from half-tone screens with regularly arranged points in single colours (yellow, silver, white or gold) – such as his work Pure Energy (1958; New York, MOMA). Continuing to evolve his practice in a variety of forms, The Lichtballette ("light ballets") involved light from moving torches projected through grids, intended to alter the viewer's perception of space. Otto Piene’s pioneering large-scale public projects and environments began in the late 1960s. His Sky Art Events comprised inflatable air sculptures that conveyed ideas concerning the cosmos and environmental awareness. Most notable was Piene’s monumental 700 metre-long rainbow created in 1972 for the closing ceremony of the 20th Olympic Games in Munich. The artist’s active collaborations with technicians and natural scientists helped to provide new perspectives for art and today find resonance in the work of contemporary artists such as Olafur Eliasson and Tomás Saraceno. From the early 1980s Piene combined his seminal smoke and fire pictures with the grids from his ZERO group period. From 1998 onwards he developed immersive light rooms, utilising projections to alternate light intensity, colour and form for various museums such as the Kunsthalle Bremen. In 2008, Otto Piene founded the international ZERO foundation with Günther Uecker, Heinz Mack and Mattijs Visser. The foundation houses the ZERO group archives from the three Düsseldorfer artists as well as documents and photos from other related artists that include: Lucio Fontana, Yves Klein and Jean Tinguely. Within this solo exhibition, a selection of works in a range of media will be presented dating from 1969 to 2004, from fire gouache on board to gouache on paper and oil on canvas, to a programmed pneumatic inflatable sculpture and site-specific light room installation. Otto Piene’s solo exhibition at ARNDT Berlin coincides with the group exhibition “ZERO The International art movement of the 50s and 1960s” at the Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin from March 21 – June 8, 2015. This simultaneous exhibition presents works from the ZERO movement by artists that include Otto Piene, Heinz Mack and Günther Uecker. Otto Piene (b. 1928, Laasphe, Germany - † 2014, Berlin, Germany) studied painting and art education at the Academy of Art in Munich and the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. From 1952 to 1957 he studied philosophy at the University of Cologne. In 1964 he was appointed Visiting Professor at the University of Pennsylvania. From 1968 to 1971 he was appointed the first Fellow at the newly founded Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In 1972 he became a professor of Environmental Art at MIT.  In 1974 he was appointed as the Director of the CAVS and held this role until 1994. Otto Piene represented Germany at the Venice Biennale in 1967 and 1971 and exhibited at Documenta in Kassel, Germany, in 1959, 1964 and 1977. In 1985, he exhibited at the São Paulo Biennial. In 2014 the Deutsche Bank KunstHalle and the Neue National Galerie in Berlin presented the exhibition "Otto Piene: More Sky". His works are housed in numerous international museum collections that include: the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the National Museum of Modern Art (MOMAT), Tokyo; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; and the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. ARNDT Berlin Potsdamer Strasse 96 10785 Berlin info@arndtberlin.com

Arndt

PHILIP-LORCA DICORCIA | DAVID ZWIRNER

NEW YORK | PHILIP-LORCA DICORCIA  | “EAST OF EDEN” | DAVID ZWIRNER THROUGH MAY 2ND, 2015

Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Cain and Abel (2013)

Currently on view at David Zwirner is East of Eden, Philip-Lorca diCorcia’s latest photographic investigation on contemporary humanity and its position within a complexly interwoven cultural setting.  This series reflects diCorcia’s interpretation of a search for equilibrium after the deep impacts of the Financial Crisis in 2007, both during and after the Bush administration.

Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Genesis (2015)

Considered one of the most influential contemporary photographers currently working, diCorcia is widely recognized for his potent juxtapositions in which obliquely evident narratives merge with his earnest testimonial approach. Between documentation and a more orchestrated, fictive presence, the New York-based artist equally glorifies and satirizes subject matter frequently positioned in enigmatic settings.

Similar to Hustlers – his 2013 exhibition, where diCorcia turned his camera to male prostitutes around Los Angeles and captured them in their particular environments in exchange for their actual hourly rates – East of Eden seems to be the outcome of an ambitious visual and contextual investigation.  Evident from its title, the show builds a bridge between the financial meltdown and the Book of Genesis, tying certain motifs and characters in the said text with this contemporary case.  Underlining how matters related to mankind, from carnal desires to untamable greed, remain timeless, diCorcia’s photographs of the human condition beguile the eye with their striking ensembles, while leaving behind many more questions yet to be answered.

Philip-Lorca diCorcia, The Hamptons (2008)

Genesis, for example depicts a toddler enchantedly jumping on a bed that has a doll stuck inside its sheets, in what seems to an upper class winter house. The Hamptons, on the other hand, strikes with its camera perspective and curious narrative, composing a bitter humor through two dogs, seemingly of valuable breeds, gazing into a pornographic image on a flatscreen TV in a highly prosperous domestic interior.

Cain and Abel re-imagines the Biblical brother figures as two male lovers caressing each other under the glance of a nude pregnant woman, a strong reference to their mother Eve. While in the original text Cain is depicted murdering Abel, in diCorcia’s retelling, the duo appears as the agents of an affair overshadowed by their mother’s presence, an attempt to underline the overlooked affinities between each contradiction.

Philip-Lorca diCorcia: East of Eden is on view at David Zwirner through May 2, 2015.

Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Lynn and Shirley (2008)

Philip-Lorca diCorcia, East of Eden (Installation View)

*All images are by Osman Can Yerebakan for Art Observed.

— O.C. Yerebakan

thanks to O.C. Yerebakan and  artobserved.com

ED ATKINS | VIA TUMBLR

Ed Atkins // 'Recent Ouija', solo presentation at Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, February – May 2015 / 'Surround Audience', New Museum Triennial, NYC, February 2015 / 'This is the End', Hammer Museum, LA, April 2015 / Solo presentation at Cabinet, London, Spring 2015 / Istanbul Biennial, September 2015 / 'Rum, Sodomy and the Lash', Eden Eden, Berlin, Autumn 2015 / Solo presentation at Gavin Brown's Enterprise, NYC, Autumn 2015 / Solo presentation at Dépendence, Brussels, Winter 2015 / etc. //

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Teaser from Carlos Rimini on Vimeo.

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Ed Atkins at Kunsthalle Zürich from Carlos Rimini on Vimeo.

15 February to 10 May 2014

Opening 14 February 6 till 9pm

Limmatstrasse 270

CH-8005 Zürich

kunsthallezurich.ch/

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’Man of Steel’

Screening programme as part of Performa 13

Anthology Film Archive, NYC

Thursday 23 November 2013 , 7.30pm

http://13.performa-arts.org/event/ed-atkins

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JEPPE HEIN | 303 GALLERY

Jeppe Hein All We Need Is Inside 303 Gallery is pleased to present "All We Need Is Inside," our third exhibition of new work from Jeppe Hein. JEPPE HEIN ALL WE NEED IS INSIDE April 16 - May 30, 2015 On this occasion, Hein presents a collection of works in disparate media, encouraging viewers to enter into their own inner dialogues. Focusing his attention on the awareness of one's own body and mind, Hein creates an experiential narrative in which the viewer becomes gracefully cognizant of his own being through the traversal of the exhibition space and its signifying works. Upon entering the space, a glowing neon mirror announces ALL WE NEED IS INSIDE, imposing a prism through which the viewer processes the surrounding space. Turning away from this work is an encounter with a series of Breathing Watercolors, in which Hein's own breath guides the application of blue stripes painted directly onto the white wall.  The intensity of color, deep and vigorous at the beginning of each stroke, gradually fades into a pale shade toward the bottom of each stripe, physically recording the process of air gradually escaping from the body. Echoing this work is Breath, in which Hein's own breath is encased in glass spheres lying on the floor. In the center of the gallery, Sine Curve I implicates the viewer's perception in the creation of the work. Its multifaceted reflection produces an alien experience of the gallery space, disorienting the subject of its reflection and forcing a new type of environmental consciousness. Its sculptural shape is reminiscent of the sinus rhythm, a diagrammatic recording of the normal beating of a heart. In another mirror work, Invisible Eye, Hein has placed a flickering candle behind a two-way mirror. This elemental object of ritual is subverted by Hein's intervention, as candle and viewer merge into one another, resulting in the placement of a flaming third eye onto the viewer's forehead. This suggestion of enlightenment, both physical and spiritual, looks toward an enigmatic and foreign sense of being, implicating the viewer not only in an encounter with an artwork, but in a confrontation with an obscure and unknown self. In November of this year, he will open a solo show at Kunstmuseum, Wolfsburg, Germany. Recent exhibitions include “A Smile For You” (2013) at Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm and Wanås Konst, Sweden; “Robert-Jacobsen-Preisträger” (2012) Museum Würth, Bad Mergentheim, Germany; “360?” (2011) at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan; “1xMuseum, 10xRooms, 11xWorks” (2010) at Neues Museum Nürnberg; Distance (2010) at IMA - Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis; “Sense City” (2009) at AroS Museum of Art, Århus, Denmark. Permanent installations of his works were realized in 2014 at Musikkens Hus, Aalborg, Denmark and the New Media Library Högskolan Dalarna, Falun, Sweden. His works are held in institutional collections such as the Tate Gallery, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt/Main; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Hein lives and works in Berlin. 303 Gallery represents the work of Doug Aitken, Valentin Carron, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Ceal Floyer, Karel Funk, Maureen Gallace, Tim Gardner, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Kim Gordon, Rodney Graham, Mary Heilmann, Jeppe Hein, Jens Hoffmann, Larry Johnson, Matt Johnson, Jacob Kassay, Karen Kilimnik, Alicja Kwade, Elad Lassry, Florian Maier-Aichen, Nick Mauss, Mike Nelson, Kristin Oppenheim, Eva Rothschild, Collier Schorr, Stephen Shore, Sue Williams, Jane and Louise Wilson,303 Gallery is open Tuesday-Saturday from 10 am - 6 pm. For further information please visit us at www.303gallery.com or contact Cristian Alexa, Kathryn Erdman, Thomas Arsac or Erika Weiss.

303 GALLERY 507 W 24th Street NY 10011 New York, NY New York North AmericaT: +1 (212) 255 - 1121 F: +1 (212) 255 -0024 M: W: www.303gallery.com

JOHN BALDESSARRI | MARIAN GOODMAN

John Baldessari  |  Pictures & Scripts  |   Marian Goodman London, February 28 – April 25, 2015

Images courtesy of Marian Goodman, London

Press Release:

Marian Goodman Gallery, London and Galerie Marian Goodman, Paris are pleased to present two simultaneous exhibitions by John Baldessari. Pictures & Scripts, at the London gallery will present a series of new works, the artists first solo exhibition in London since his retrospective Pure Beauty at Tate Modern in 2009. Concurrently at Galerie Marian Goodman, Paris, Early Work will show for the first time a refined selection of important early works from Baldessari’s practice.

Pictures & Scripts is a series of 20 new paintings that juxtapose still images appropriated from black and white films with excerpts from fictive narrative film scripts. Removed from their original contexts, these appropriated film stills capture moments of paused action, within which selected forms have been discretely over-painted in monochrome fields. The excerpts of dialogue between unknown characters hint at conversations between art world insiders, humorously denuding the commercial arm of the art industry. The lineage of these diptychs can be traced back to Baldessari’s early experiments with text and image in the mid-1960s, wherein empty canvases were painted with statements derived from contemporary art theory, one of which, Space, 1966-68, will be presented in the Paris exhibition.

The film images in Pictures & Scripts are cropped to heighten their ambiguity, deliberately isolating iconic film roles like cowboys, gangsters and ingénues, displaced from their original dramatic context and animated with new narratives for the viewer to construct. Each painting is a diptych composed of an image and text element, the text half of each painting similarly presents a glimpse of a larger dialogue, seemingly lifted from its original context. Language and image are presented on equal ground without hierarchy, so that the essence of the work is in the intersection of the two. The arrangement of words and images has been a defining interest of Baldessari’s since the 1960s when he stated “a word could be an image or an image could be a word, they could be interchangeable’’.

Initially trained as a painter, Baldessari began experimenting with text and photography and incorporating them into his work in the mid-1960s, evolving his practice through the 1970s into printmaking, film, sculpture and installation. Baldessari has developed a body of work that demonstrates and discloses the narrative potential of images and their associative power with text and language of which the foundations can be found in a selection of key pieces in Early Work.

Early Work at the Paris gallery comprises examples from most of Baldessari’s major series; National City, Commissioned Painting, Thaumatrope, Vanitas, Portrait and Goya series, each giving a unique overview of the breadth and development of his practice. Some of the work on display, including Study for Econ-O-Wash (Version B), 1967 have rarely been exhibited since their creation.

Bird #1, 1962, the earliest work in the exhibition, presents an image of a bird falling through the picture plane. Again, an early example of Baldessari’s use of cropping for dramatic effect, the bird has been cut in such a cinematic way as to suggest its falling through the air. Bird #1 belongs to a small group of paintings that escaped destruction, when on July 24 1970 Baldessari decided to ceremoniously cremate 125 works, including many oil paintings, made between 1953 and 1966.

Following Baldessari’s seminal statement “I will not make any more boring Art”, he conceived the workThe Artist Hitting Various Objects with a Golf Club, 1972-73, composed of 30 photographs of the artist swinging and hitting with a golf club objects excavated from a dump, as a parody of cataloging rather than a thorough straight classification.

Portrait: Various Identities Hidden With Name/Date Cards, 1974 echoes the work Portrait: Artist’s Identity Hidden with Various Hats, 1974, a work in the collection of LACMA, Los Angeles, which illustrates the recurrence of portraits with faces obscured by domestic objects or spots of varying colours. For Baldessari faces dominate our interaction and communication and “If art is a mystery, then the face is a betrayer and should be hidden”.

Art historical references appear throughout John Baldessari’s practice, as evidenced by the work in the exhibition from the Goya Series; Goya Series: THIS, THAT, OR THE OTHER, 1997 in which we see black and white images of everyday objects; a paper clip, bouquet of flowers, and apple, juxtaposed with titles taken from The Disasters of War the 82 prints created between 1810 – 1820 by Francisco Goya.

Link: John Baldessari at Marian Goodman