DIETER ROTH & ARNULF RAINER – COLLABORATIONS

Posted on 2014-03-25

This exhibition explores the decade-long collaboration between Dieter Roth (1930 – 1998) and Arnulf Rainer (b. 1929). From 1972, Roth and Rainer worked together intermittently, producing pieces in tandem or exchanging works in progress which were then completed independently.

Roth and Rainer worked across media, producing drawings, collages, prints, films, live performances, sound works, over-worked photographs and poster designs. This exhibition focuses on a large group of works on paper, unveiling Dieter Roth’s share of the collaboration which has never been previously exhibited. A selection of the artists’ major film works will also be on view. The exhibition is curated by Björn Roth, son and longstanding collaborator of Dieter Roth

The group of almost 80 works on paper reveals an artistic dialogue full of creative tension. As opposed to the harmonious nature characteristic of artistic collaboration, these works depict two egos battling for ultimate victory within the creative process. Their intellectual rivalry is evident in the voracious spirit that emanates from the resulting works.

Opposite – Klumpfüsserin mit Absauger (Clubfoot with Suction), 1978

Exhibition runs through to May 3rd, 2014

Hauser & Wirth
23 Savile Row
W1S 2ET
London

www.hauserwirth.com

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LOUIS VUITTON – ESPACE LOUIS VUITTON MUNICH

Posted on 2014-03-25

On 29th March 2014, the Espace Louis Vuitton München opens its doors in the historic Residenzpost located in the heart of Munich, continuing the House’s long tradition of art patronage in Germany and abroad. Following its sister venues in Paris, Tokyo, Venice and Singapore, the Espace in Munich is conceived as an independent art space and aims to explore new territories in contemporary creation. With more than 320 square metres of devoted space to the arts, the Munich Espace is scheduled to present several feature exhibitions and an expansive programme of public events each year to encourage new encounters and exchange between local and international artists, art professionals, collectors and the public audience. All exhibitions and events are free of charge.

The Munich Espace launches with a group exhibition, No Such Thing As History: Four Collections and One Artist (29 March to 8 August 2014), curated by Jens Hoffmann. It presents eight new works by German photographer Annette Kelm and approximately 20 contemporary artworks of various media from four important private collections based in Munich: the ICC, Lorenz/Amandine Cornette de Saint Cyr, Mackert and Wiese collections. No Such Thing As History: Four Collections and One Artist explores the concept of the collection as an archive of art. Like a library, which is an archive of literature, the collection is not only an accumulation of artworks, but also a locus for the creation of meaning and a site for witnessing the developments of art history in the framework of a larger historical canon. The exhibition’s narrative is defined by Kelm’s new works, which continue her interest in representing history through an investigation of archives and cultural and social history museums. Kelm’s inspiration is the life and work of Hannelore Mabry (1930–2013), an actress, sociologist and activist, who resided in Munich from 1966, and other members of the German feminist movement.

Espace Louis Vuitton München
Maximilianstraße 2a
80539
Munich

www.espacelouisvuittonmuenchen.com

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YOSHITOMO NARA

Posted on 2014-03-25

The exhibition will be the artist’s seventh with the gallery and will include a selection of new paintings, a series of large-scale bronze sculptures, and a survey of approximately two hundred drawings made over the last thirty years.

Nara’s bronze sculptures, which represent a new medium for the artist, depict child-like heads, busts, and figures, elements that run throughout his career. The casts were produced from clay models he sculpted with his own hands, giving their surfaces a rough-hewn appearance. In addition, the gallery’s outdoor sculpture garden will feature a fiberglass fountain, titled The Fountain of Life, consisting of a white teacup with stacked heads whose eyes appear to cry real tears.

A new series of paintings on canvas, rendered in an array of vivid colors, highlight Nara’s lush, variegated brushwork and portrayals of human innocence. In contrast, a group of large-scale billboard paintings executed on repurposed wood contain characters steeped in rock and punk music. Also on exhibit will be new collages on panel, which layer sketches and drawings and provide a glimpse of how the artist’s faces and portraits are developed.

The drawing survey comprises a small portion of Nara’s prolific output of works on paper. Rendered in pencil, acrylic, and colored pencil, the artist draws on a variety of paper types, such as found envelopes, stationery, and inexpensive lined sheets. Fusing Japanese visual traditions, Western modernism, and elements of American pop and subculture, this discursive panorama of drawings reveals the artist’s fine and purposeful draughtsmanship.

Exhibition runs through to April 12th, 2014

Blum & Poe
2727 South La Cienega Boulevard
90034
Los Angeles

www.blumandpoe.com

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HANNAH WHITAKER – COLD WAVE

Posted on 2014-03-17

This show expands on Whitaker’s interest in the Austrian logician Kurt Gödel who introduced the notion of unknowability to mathematics, a field often characterized by certainty. His ideas problematized early 20th century philosophical claims to truth and knowledge, a dialectic inherent to the medium of photography. Whitaker’s interest in Gödel led her to think of the film plane as a formal system—a set of limited variables and operations. The results establish repetitious motifs that occur both within a single image and across multiple photographs.

Employing a 4×5 view camera, she photographs using the intervention of hand-cut paper screens, often layering as many as fifteen in a single image; at times shooting through the screens and at others using them to deform an image selectively after it is shot. These in-camera processes allow her to collapse various moments in time and space onto a single sheet of film. The resulting photographs are suspended between multiple dualities: the handmade and the technical, the geometric and the photographic, the flat and dimensional, or—in the lexicon of Rosalind Krauss—the antireal and the real.

The notion of a formal system is reinforced by her use of the constitute parts of her process as subjects in their own photographs. In Cutouts (Green), Cutouts (Pink) and Cutouts (Orange), Whitaker photographed the paper detritus left behind after cutting her paper screens. She arranged these cutouts on colored paper backgrounds that reappear in different forms in other photographs, establishing material linkages across multiple works. While the photographs contain abstract elements, Whitaker’s subjects can be thought of as resolutely depictive in their familiarity—wintery landscapes, women and still lifes of banal objects. These conventional subjects are thoroughly recognizable, despite gaps in their representation.

Exhibition runs through to April 26th, 2014

M+B
612 North Almont Drive
Los Angeles
California
90069

www.mbart.com

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RUDOLF STINGEL

Posted on 2014-03-17

Over the past twenty years, Stingel has examined the nature of memory while expanding the scope and definition of painting. Echoing Albrecht Dürer’s Painter’s Manual of the sixteenth century, Stingel produced Instructions in 1989, a booklet illustrating how to create a Rudolf Stingel painting, which anticipated two decades of his investigation into the relationship between artist and artwork. In the early 1990s, he covered the walls and floors of exhibition spaces with broadloom carpet, transforming architecture into monochrome surface and texture. Later he covered gallery walls with metallic insulation board that viewers could mark and inscribe at will. Accumulating all manner of compulsive graffiti over the course of time, this material was later sectioned to form autonomous panel works, exuberantly human and anonymous. In a further turn of the screw, he cast these panels in copper and gold.

Stingel has sourced vintage black-and-white photographs of his birthplace, Merano, in the Tyrolean Alps, as the starting point for a series of immense landscape paintings measuring up to fifteen feet in width. Every nuance is meticulously recorded, from the steely, snowy peaks that appear in the photographs to the creased and discolored surfaces of the photographs themselves. Although the subject recalls the German Romantic tradition, such detectable influences are simply vehicles for Stingel’s broader concerns with memory and decline. Conflating a subject that is highly autobiographical with a conversely passive process, he has left some of the finished paintings on the studio floor to collect incidental scuffs and debris. In Untitled (2010), the calculated photorealism of the scene is desecrated by white spatters interrupting the panoramic grayscale mountainscape under a silver sky.

Opposite – Untitled, 2010

Exhibition runs through to April 19th, 2014

Gagosian Gallery
522 West 21st Street
New York
NY
10011

www.gagosian.com

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BILL DRUMMOND – THE 25 PAINTINGS

Posted on 2014-03-17

‘The 25 Paintings’ represents the climax of Drummond’s prodigious and eclectic art career begun in 1976 when he designed and built the stage sets for the 12-hour play ‘Illuminatus’ at the National Theatre in London. Since that time Drummond’s artwork has taken a multitude of forms including writing and performing music, managing bands, running record labels, forming art foundations, writing, publishing, lecturing, painting, making soup and giving away bunches of daffodils.

‘The 25 Paintings’ is the twenty fifth exhibition at Eastside Projects and exists within the gallery and across the city of Birmingham as Drummond works Wednesday-Thursday around the city and Friday-Saturday in the gallery. The central motif of the exhibition is the ‘25 Paintings’ alluded to in the title but Drummond describes his work as sculpture. The sculpture ‘The 25 Paintings’ began in 2001 and will be complete on 28 April 2025 at the end of the ‘World Tour’.

The twenty five paintings exist primarily to act as markers, signposts and advertisements for the work the artist will be carrying out across Birmingham through to June. The exhibition includes the ’25 paintings’, ‘The 60 Posters’, ‘The 25 Sixty Second Films’, three publications – ‘The 25 Paintings’, ‘MAN MAKES BED’, and ‘MAN SHINES SHOES’ – and ten lectures including three at Eastside Projects entitled ‘Art Versus Money’, ‘Painting Versus Sculpture’ and ‘Life Versus Death’.

Exhibition runs through to June 14th, 2014

Eastside Projects
86 Heath Mill Lane
Birmingham
B9 4A

eastsideprojects.org

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