SIGMAR POLKE – ALIBIS 1963-2010

Posted on 2014-04-21

The Museum of Modern Art presents the first comprehensive retrospective of Sigmar Polke (German, 1941–2010), encompassing Polke’s work across all mediums, including painting, photography, film, drawing, prints, and sculpture. Widely regarded as one of the most influential artists of the postwar generation, Polke possessed an irreverent wit that, coupled with his exceptional grasp of the properties of his materials, pushed him to experiment freely with the conventions of art and art history. Constantly searching, Polke studiously avoided any one signature style or medium; his method exemplified the definition of alibi, “in or at another place,” which also suggests a deflection of blame. This exhibition places Polke’s enormous skepticism of all social, political, and artistic traditions against German history and the country’s transformation in the postwar period. Four gallery spaces on MoMA’s second floor are dedicated to the exhibition, which comprises more than 250 works and constitutes one of the largest exhibitions ever organized at the Museum.

The exhibition is organized chronologically and across mediums, ranging from the intimacy of a notebook to pieces that test the architectural scale of most museum galleries. Among the many noted works on view are 13 films by Polke, including eight which have never before been available; a performance made for West German television that was last seen when it aired in 1972; and a group of monumental paintings made entirely of soot on glass that have never been exhibited in the United States.

Opposite – Raster Drawing (Portrait of Lee Harvey Oswald), 1963

Exhibition runs through to August 3rd, 2014

Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)
11 W 53rd St
Midtown East
New York
10019

www.moma.org

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MATT LIPPS – THE POPULIST CAMERA

Posted on 2014-04-21

The exhibition consists of intriguing still lives that combine appropriated imagery with personal photographs. Using collage strategies, sculptural tropes and theater staging techniques, Lipps’s series is a requiem for analog image-making, which is relevant to the ubiquity of photography in the digital age.

The source material of Lipps’s series comes from a seventeen-volume set of books called Library of Photography, published in the 1970s by Time-Life. Meant to be a comprehensive how-to manual, the books were illustrated with hundreds of mostly black and white photographs. Lipps has cut out and assembled almost 500 figures from the books, building cardboard structures for them, so they become autonomous, moveable “actors,” representing divergent realities, on a multi-tiered proscenium.

The colourful backgrounds of the series come from 35mm photographs taken by Lipps when he was a photography student. The warm emotional color of the authored photographs contrasts dramatically with the cool distant appearance of the appropriated ones. The combination of authored and found photographs creates a tension between the subjective and objective uses of the medium and its perspectives on history.

Opposite – Camera, 2013

Exhibition runs through to May 10th, 2014

Josh Lilley
44-46 Riding House Street
London
W1W 7EX

jessicasilvermangallery.com

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HELEN PASHGIAN – LIGHT INVISIBLE

Posted on 2014-04-21

Helen Pashgian: Light Invisible features the first large-scale sculptural installation by this pioneer of the Light and Space movement.

After taking up sculpture in the late 1960s, Pashgian became one of a group of artists in the Los Angeles to experiment with new materials such as fiberglass, resin, plastic, and coated glass. For the current exhibition, Pashgian has created 12 molded-acrylic columns that fill an entire gallery. The sculpture creates an immersive viewing experience that invites meditations on the nature of material and light. To create the columns that constitute the sculptural installation at LACMA, the artist heated large sheets of acrylic until they became soft, like fabric. Then, she wrapped each softened sheet around a wooden mold and allowed it to harden again. Each of the 12 columnar elements is made up of two such molded forms, which are then further enhanced.

Despite their evident simplicity, the sculptures reveal their internal forms only on close inspection, seeming to hover above the floor as they focus, reflect, and refract light. Pashgian says, “I think of the columns as ‘presences’ in space—presences that do not reveal everything at once. One must move around to observe changes: coming and going, appearing and receding, visible and invisible, a phenomenon of constant movement…It touches on the mysterious part beyond which the eye cannot go but beyond which the eye struggles to go.”

Exhibition runs through to June 29th, 2014

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art
5905 Wilshire Boulevard
Los Angeles
CA 90036

www.lacma.org

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IMI KNOEBEL – RAUM 19 IV

Posted on 2014-04-14

Imi Knoebel belongs to the group of artists that have developed a radical, minimal form vocabulary in the 1960s. Since the beginning of his artistic career, Kasimir Malerwitch has always been a very important reference point. Avoiding any figuration, his early work is characterized by a reduced use of color and a geometric form language: having started with black and white line paintings and plywood installations, he later turned to colorful painting on wood or aluminum. His mostly serial work procedure on standardized materials always reveals the hand-made gesture of the artist, such as visible brush strokes.

The room-installation Raum 19, which Imi Knoebel realised in the Düsseldorfer Kunstakademie in 1968, plays a major role in his non-figuartive work that already back then ranges between painting and object. Constructive basic forms made of hardboard, such as circular segments, stretcher frames, cubes and boards are stacked or arranged side by side. “Despite its sculptural-installative presence, Raum 19 alludes to fundamental questions of painting. This is made clear by an arsenal of stretchers and its parts, that have acquit themselves of their function as picture carriers but still refer to painting at the same time.” (Bernhard Bürgi, 1989). Also the leaning or stacked hardboards remind of monochrome panel paintings Imi Knoebel later works on in his group of Hartfaserbilder.

Exhibition runs through to June 7th, 2014

Galerie Christian Lethert
Antwerpener Straße 4
D – 50672 Köln (Cologne)
Germany

www.christianlethert.com

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OLIVIER CASTEL – FOUNTAIN

Posted on 2014-04-14

In 2010, aged eighty, the French actor Jeanne Moreau performed a public reading of the screenplay for Le Moine (The Monk), written by Luis Buñuel and Jean-Claude Carrière in 1970. Moreau was cast in the role of Mathilde, a wicked and seductive woman who disguises herself as a monk and causes a succession of terrible events, but the film was never realised.

For his exhibition at Ibid, Castel has made a re-recording of Moreau’s reading performed by a German woman, who happens to be a singer, and who speaks very little French. Like the majority of visitors to the exhibition, the narrator doesn’t understand the content of the French text. She performs the words as a melody. The meaning is removed and the language becomes abstract. In French, the words for voice (voix) and path (voie) are homophonous, suggesting the potential of the voice to create its own path.

Castel uses the voice to animate the room, like a musical box. The darkened room mimics the succession of spaces in which the story takes place – a monk’s cell, cellar, bedroom, confessional box, cave, carriage, dungeon, prison cell and balcony. The transformation of the room by Mathilde’s voice mirrors the transformation she operates on the main character, the monk, as he turns from piety to sexual desire, murder and ultimately Satanism.

The unrealised film is staged without images; comprising the voice, the room and a red spot of light from a moving head light, programmed to draw continuously on the gallery floor for the time taken to read the screenplay aloud. The light is reminiscent of a candle or a flame dancing in a fire. It recalls the Gothic, echoing the origins of the screenplay – a late 18th Century novel by Matthew Gregory Lewis – but also the proto-cinematic, as an elementary form of moving image.

A series of drawings on the walls break from the main focus of the exhibition and permit the visitor to explore the space on their own terms. The drawings are made of powdered cement, a material that is transformed as part of a process and used here in an unfinished state. The drawings are photographed in black and white and printed on acetate. Like the light, the drawings present a partial representation and one that is temporal, existing only long enough for the photograph to be taken.

Exhibition runs through to May 3rd, 2014

Ibid.
37 Albemarle Street
London
W1S 4JF

ibidprojects.com

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MARIA RUBINKE – IT’S BETTER TO BURN OUT THAN TO FADE AWAY

Posted on 2014-04-14

The pure white porcelain surface attracts the gaze of the viewer, but at the same time distorts our presuppositions when the small porcelain girls are slowly broken down and subjected to contrast-filled madness. They sink down and seem to drown in the thick mud of the bog and are fatally bitten by a snake. Like the Surrealists, Maria Rubinke thematizes the complexity of the human psyche and works in a formal idiom all her own.

The exhibition has been created throughout the artist’s 27th year – a year that has offered emotional ups and downs. With inspiration from ‘Club 27’, the group of legendary artists who lost their lives at the age of 27, combined with her own experience, Maria Rubinke subjects her innocent little china girl to a process of decomposition until she has quite vanished and only the delicate little shoes remain, slowly consumed by an army of ants.

Maria Rubinke works in an extremely structured way, but for this exhibition has for the first time let go from the beginning of the creative process and let the works slowly create themselves as she worked through her own personal crisis. This is why there are also traces of a kind of panic throughout the exhibition, which reflects the emotional plunge the artist has undergone – Rubinke has let go, let the dark, gloomy thoughts find expression in the porcelain, ending with a rebirth. This is manifested in the sculpture I died a hundred times, which shows the porcelain girl standing on a heap of black skulls, carrying a small infant whose umbilical cord has not yet been cut. The title of the sculpture is a quotation from the singer Amy Winehouse – a ‘member’ of Club 27.

Exhibition runs through to May 17th, 2014

Martin Asbæk Gallery
Bredgade 23
DK-1260 Copenhagen
Denmark

www.martinasbaek.com

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