STEVE MCQUEEN | MARIAN GOODMAN

Steve McQueen, Remember Me (detail), 2016. Acrylic paint on 77 neon borosilicate tubes, 19 5/8 to 39 5/16 inches, 3/16 to 3/8 inch diameter. Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery. Photo: Rebecca Fanuele.

Steve McQueen January 9–February 27, 2016 Galerie Marian Goodman 79 rue du Temple 75003 Paris France T +33 1 48 04 70 52 paris@mariangoodman.com mariangoodman.com "I want to put the public in a situation where everyone becomes acutely sensitive to themselves, to their body and respiration." Steve McQueen Marian Goodman Gallery in Paris is proud to announce an exhibition by Steve McQueen to launch the 2016 season. We present Ashes, his latest film installation, as well as several new works produced especially for this, his fifth exhibition at the gallery. Steve McQueen's latest projects comprise a wall installation formed of 77 dark blue neon lights, each a unique handwritten version of the phrase Remember Me, as well as two sculptural works, Broken Column and Moonlit. Ashes is an immersive work composed of two films projected simultaneously on either side of a free-hanging screen. First is a portrait of Ashes, a young man from Grenada from where the artist's family also originated. Cracking a mischievous smile and taunting the camera, Ashes is seated at the prow of a boat sailing the Caribbean Sea. The footage was captured during the production of another work, titled Caribs' Leap (2002). Shot live on Super 8 film by the renowned cinematographer Robby Müller, the images illustrate the documentary aspect of McQueen's work. Ashes's carefree demeanor and apparent freedom stand in contrast to the content of the second film projected on the other side of the screen and shot eight years later in a Grenada cemetery, in contrast to the idyllic postcard pictures of the Caribbean island. "Life and death have always lived side by side, in every aspect of life," said McQueen. "We live with ghosts in our everyday." The intensity of the piece is derived from the juxtaposition of the two projections (life and death, boundless space and enclosed space) linked by an off-screen voice. McQueen uses a monologue to pull together the threads of a story that are absent from the images. Employing this narrative device, each viewer is rendered a witness to the drama through the oral testimonies of Ashes’s friends. Born in London in 1969, Steve McQueen has said "I discovered filmmaking, and that was it, a eureka moment. I was 19 years old." In 1993, as he was about to graduate from Goldsmiths, University of London, he showed his first video, Bear, at the Royal College of Art in London. This first video revealed some of the themes that theartist continued to explore in the 1990s, such as the relationship of the body to space. His work was recognized in 1999 when he was awarded the Turner Prize. McQueen's work has been the subject of many museums around the world, including the National Portrait Gallery in London (2010), the De Pont Museum of Contemporary Art in Tilburg (2009), the Institute of Contemporary Art in London, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York (1997). In 2009, he was selected to represent Great Britain at the Venice Biennale. He participated in Documenta X (1997), Documenta XI (2002), and Documenta XII (2007). Most recently, his work was the subject of retrospective exhibitions, at the ArtInstitute of Chicago (2012) and at the Schaulager in Basel (2014). His last museum exhibition in France was in 2003 at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York will hold a new solo show of his work in spring 2016. Internationally renowned as a filmmaker, McQueen has directed three feature films: Hunger (2008), Shame(2011), and 12 Years a Slave (2014). He won the "camera d'or" award at the Cannes Film Festival for Hungerand the Oscar for the Best Motion Picture for 12 Years a Slave in 2014. For further press information, please contact Raphaële Coutant:  raphaele@mariangoodman.com / T +33 1 48 04 70 52 For all other enquiries, please contact paris@mariangoodman.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