General Idea sweeps through the formal repertoire of recent art history and enters into a critical, contradictory and ironic discussion. The trio was primarily interested in classical modern art, which they infected with the General Idea bacillus. They also diligently appropriated popular traditional visual worlds and pop-cultural media, commentated on the art cliché idea and the world of media, reflected on the structure of the art trade on the example of conceptual works of art, and worked on the current concepts of art. Their work covers a wide range of media and includes installations, objects, performances, photographs, works on canvas, videos and drawings, as well as multiples, magazines, postcards and posters. The aesthetics oscillate between banal to kitschy forms from the everyday world and the appropriation of works of art and styles as examples of individual artistic metaphors. In 1974, the group founded the Art Metropole art company in Toronto, which is still active in producing and selling multiples, videos and books by artists. All this made General Idea's name internationally known in connection with its AIDS activism in the 1980s and 90s.
With these works, General Idea refers to a topical aesthetic discourse, for references to classical modern art are well in fashion, and the idea of the mutual penetration of art and life is once again regarded as a feasible vision. Is it not reasonable, and also comforting in our crisis-racked times, to think back to the utopias of the classical avant-garde? [Text: Dominique von Burg]
The preview takes place in connection with the Season Opening The Zurich Galleries on Thursday, 27 August 2009 from 5 to 8 p.m. AA Bronson will be present on Saturday, 29 August. We shall be pleased to provide you with relevant picture material on request (office@mai36.com). We look forward to welcoming you to our gallery and thank you for your interest.
Mai 36 Galerie
Luigi Ghirri Vintage Prints 1970 – 1980
August 28 to September 26, 2009
We have pleasure in presenting a selection of early prints by the Italian photographer Luigi Ghirri (1943-1992), taken between 1970 and 1980. This is the first exhibition by this outstanding photographer, which consists exclusively of vintage prints, to be held in a gallery in Switzerland.
The photo of the planet Earth taken from space by the crew of Apollo 8 in December 1968 effected a lasting change on our view of the world. "It was a picture of the world, and it contained all the pictures in the world at the same time", wrote Luigi Ghirri in 1978 in a short text on the relationship between photography and reality.
Ghirri regarded his work as a photographer as an attempt to interpret the world through artistic means. To him, photography represented a possibility of approaching this world and examining more thoroughly the things that make up our reality. He was well aware of both the ambiguity of concepts such as reality and the fragmentary character of photography, which can only show incomplete fragments of the world in terms of both space and time. Nevertheless, he regarded the photographic way of seeing and the capturing of things in images as the most suitable way of continuously ensuring the existence of the world in which we live and of expressing something about this world. In 1977, Susan Sontag described photographs as "fragments of the world", as miniatures of reality" in her collection of essays entitled "On Photography", at the same time remarking critically that the photograph, as a small fraction of space and time, encourages a nominalistic view of social reality. Photography turns the world into "a stringing together of unrelated, freely floating particles". Luigi Ghirri, who regarded the fragmentary nature of photography as one of its special qualities, wanted to create a relationship between these freely floating particles: "To me, the eradication of the space that surrounds the specific fragment of the picture is just as important as the image that is being shown; it is through this erasure that the picture acquires its expression, that it can be allotted a category [...] The image invites us to perceive the rest of reality, which is invisible."
Ghirri worked on a genealogy of the world that surrounded him with great curiosity and analytical precision and, at the same time, an almost tender way of perceiving apparently casual and unimportant aspects. Like William Eggleston in the USA, he used his camera to record everyday scenes, landscapes, architecture and things. The result was exceptionally precisely composed pictures that define the typical and the specific in everyday life at one and the same time, and which are atmospherically very condensed and intensive despite their usually small format. From the very beginning, the Italian landscape, and in particular his home region of Reggio Emilia, formed a focal point of his work. This exhibition also shows a representative selection of photographs taken in Switzerland, most of them in the 1970s.
Luigi Ghirri grouped his pictures into thematic series – which do not, however, represent hermetic units – which he would occasionally expand. Frequently, he would put individual photographs into several different series, a clear indication of the importance that he ascribed to seeing things in lively correspondence with one another. Recently, several important monographic exhibitions introducing the work of Luigi Ghirri have been held, for example at Fotomuseum Winterthur in 2001, at the Galleria d’Arte Moderna in Bologna in 2005, and at Aperture in New York in 2008. [Text: Christine Heidemann]
In the framework of the Season Opening The Zurich Galleries, a preview will be held on Thursday, 27 August from 5 to 8 p.m. We will gladly provide you with relevant picture material on request (office@mai36.com). We look forward to welcoming you to the gallery, and we thank you for your interest.
