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Esther Schipper, Berlin |
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Grönlund-Nisunen
November 21 - December 23,
2009
On the occasion of their third exhibition
at Esther Schipper, Grönlund-Nisunen two new
works dealing with the visualization of motion, energy and
space. Tommi Grönlund and Petteri Nisunen have been working
together since 1993 in the fields of architecture, art and
music. With their simple formal idiom and their use of
geometric forms such as line, plane and circle, the artists
combine aspects of kinetic art with references to modernism.
In their works an experimental artistic practice in the course
of which materials and techniques take shape. The artists
build all the individual components themselves and use the
exhibition context to develop test situations whose results
remain unpredictable. The use of low-tech material is part of
this artistic approach belonging to the formal parameter of
experimental electronic music.
In the gallery's darkened main space stand
twelve glass tubes supported by metal structures, arranged in
a line across the width of the room. Liquid Diagram
(2009) consists of a group of four works presented here
together in a large installation created specially for the
exhibition. Each work consists of three glass tubes mounted on
round bottomed flasks filled one quarter full with distilled
water and connected by a system of switches. An electrical
heating element controls the air temperature inside the
flasks. The flasks are lit from below, making the rising and
falling of the water level visible. At the same time, a poetic
element is introduced into the technical process. The system
is a sensitive one which reacts not only to the different heat
states, but also, like a barometer, to uncontrollable
fluctuations of pressure outside the unit. In the smaller
room, a stainless-steel wheel rotates on its axis halfway
between floor and ceiling. The title Cyclon (2009)
refers to the motion of the object, which is driven by a small
motor. The movement produces a draft.
The prints 50
circles (2007) and 100 circles (2007) are part
of a series of five black-and-white screen prints on paper in
a limit edition of twelve. They illustrate interferences
created by the overlapping of simple, graphic elements such as
straight and curved lines.
Tommi Grönlund runs the internationally
successful music label Sähkö Recordings and gave important
impulses for the development of interdisciplinary electronic
music. Among others he produced music positions like Jimi
Tenor and Pansonic.
To coincide with the exhibition, argobooks,
Berlin, is publishing the first major artist's book by
Grönlund-Nisunen. As well as essays by Jyrki Siukonen and Carl
Michael von Hausswolff, the book includes an overview of works
and projects realized over the past decade including
descriptions and where each work has been shown.
Image:
Grönlund-Nisunen
Liquid Diagram
(2009)
Courtesy of Esther Schipper, Berlin
ESTHER SCHIPPER
Linienstrasse
85 D-10119 Berlin +49 (0)30 28390139
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kurimanzutto, Mexico City |
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Obsidiana
Jimmie Durham
November 11, 2009 to February 6, 2010
kurimanzutto presents
Obsidiana by Jimmie Durham, a
project developed over the last two years. Durham's
multifarious practice spans from drawing, sculpture,
installation and video to performance, literature and poetry.
Jimmie Durham lived and worked in Mexico, in the southern city
of Cuernavaca from 1987 until 1994. Afterwards he started
traveling back and forth throughout Eurasia, which stirred up
a concern in him about the idea of Europe: "which doesn't
describe an actual continent but is only a political
obfuscation". It is fifteen years after his departure that he
presents his first solo show in the country.
Durham has stated his refusal for the
expectancy of purity in art. His work is always embedded and
affected by the location in which it is produced. This
exhibition meditates upon obsidian, first, as a beautiful
material for Durham, secondly, as a stone inlayed by multiple
connotations, heavy cultural preconceptions and layers of
history; all of which the artist tries to make manifest by
enclosing the presence of the material in three different
abstract sculptures displayed in individual atmospheres.
Obsidian, a black volcanic glass with an irregular molecular
structure, whose tonalities vary according to the direction in
which it is sectioned, was widely used by Aztec, Toltec and
Huastec Mexicans.
The first work at the entrance of the
exhibition, The Doorman, is one of Durham's
distinctive anthropomorphic sculptures. This character, made
out of iron, Murano glass and gold, showing a red obsidian
heart, personifies Tezcatlipoca. Tezcatlipoca -that means
"smoking mirror"- was represented by Aztecs with a polished
black obsidian on his chest. He was Quetzalcoatl's brother and
complementary deity. The Nahua legend tells that they created
the world together, however for the Toltecs they were rivals
and opponents. In European mythology, Vulcano, for Romans, or
Hefesto, for Greeks, was a god who emerged from the
profundities. He is described as a lame male, whose foot was
grabbed while he was escaping from hell. Tezcatlipoca is also
associated with the underground and the darkness, and depicted
with one foot only too. This happenstance has unchained
Durham's investigation.
The artist has expressed his distrust in
written language for it takes away memory and constricts "how
and what to think and to be", (1) however this very
circumstance plays a central part of his practice. Instead of
establishing connections, the presence of texts
(mistranslations, word-games, and words labeling objects)
trigger meaningful disruptions in Durham's work. His
apparently innocent yet awry mimicry and verbalization of
attitudes and rules regulating artistic creation and
consumption, implicates the viewer with humor. Likewise in
Bertolt Brecht' theatre-plays, there is no attempt to divert
the audience from the fact that, what they are seeing, is
nothing else but a play -or a sculpture, in Durham's case-;
quite the opposite, it is crucial to acknowledge it.
Nevertheless, this supposed permissiveness of fiction reveals
the historical complicities of social actors.
For this project Jimmie Durham has immersed
in a process of knowledge of this Mexican stone, its natural
state and characteristics, and the possible ways to transform
it. Durham reflects on the cultural features associated to the
very existence of a rock like this. For him, ideas
concomitantly occur with the recognition of materials, thus
any intellectual development relies upon these physical
encounters
(1) Bossé, Laurence and Garimoth, Julia
(2008) "Interview with Jimmie Durham" in Jimmie
Durham
Rejected Stones... Paris: Musée d'Art moderne de la Ville de
Paris / ARC. pp. 13.
Image:
Jimmie Durham
The Doorman,
2009
Courtesy of kurimanzutto, Mexico City
kurimanzutto
gob. rafael rebollar
# 94
col. san miguel chapultepec
11850 Mexico
City
5255 5286.3059
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Galeria Fucares, Madrid |
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CARLOS SCHWARTZ
26th November 2009 -
23rd January 2010
Fúcares Gallery presents
in its Madrid headquarters an exhibition of the latest works
by Carlos Schwartz. It is made up of a group
of pieces - sculptures, photographs and assembled objects.
Light is still their common element, linking meaning and
intent.
Light places these pieces on an unfamiliar
and unreal plane from which they question the viewer. Stairs
that go up to nowhere, ramps and footbridges that end on the
wall, all ask us about their value as transit elements. In
addition, light places them on a different plane of meaning
from which they defy our sight: light is that which comes
from somewhere else and demonstrates the materiality of
objects, while transcending it. Thus, the fluorescent
tubes embody a sense of the sacred, and their industrial
nature also shows the contradictions between the mundane and
the transcendent, creating a dialectical tension from which a
sense of the unfamiliar emerges.
However, when making the objects, the
artist does without some of these considerations and focuses
on the playful aspect of the relationships among the light,
the altar lamp, space and the elements with which it is
assembled. A broken porcelain Harlequin, a top hat made of
transparent glass, a deer horn or a decorative earthenware
disc swap their status due to the effect caused by their
proximity to the fluorescent tubes, as if they disguised
themselves to play adopting new identities and meanings.
The photographs that Carlos Schwartz is
first presenting here are images of screens, streetlamps,
bulbs, light signals that would invent the way we have to
shape light.
Image:
Carlos Schwartz, Pasarela,
2009
Metal y luz.
330 x 345 x 70 cm
Fúcares MADRID
Conde de Xiquena,
12 1º Izq.
28004 Madrid
Spain
+34 91 319 74 02
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Galerie Nordenhake, Berlin |
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FLORIAN SLOTAWA
November 21, 2009 -
January 30, 2010
Galerie Nordenhake is
pleased to present its first solo exhibition with
Florian Slotawa. Instead of bringing new
objects into the world, the artist recontextualises and
rearranges what already exists and frequently develops his
works through an intensive dialogue with the places in which
they are presented. His fascination for shifts in meaning and
the temporary reassignment of function is an important point
of departure for this exhibition, which brings together
photographs of his studio with a sculptural
intervention.
The artist is known for his radical
process, in which he uses his own possessions - from a car to
a pair of skis - as sculptural material. His personal objects
can, for a short time, transform into a meaningful work - as
is the case with the aptly named "The Last Judgment"
- only to land back in his apartment after the end of the
exhibition as banal, functional objects. With these so-called
"Besitzarbeiten" ("property works"), he has been
developing since 1996 an array of temporary sculptural
installations with high complexity and an emphasis on formal
precision. The newest was generated this year for his recent
solo exhibition at P.S.1, New York, and deals with Mondrian's
"Pier and Ocean" (a seminal work from Mondrian's
development of Geometric Abstraction). The
"Besitzarbeiten" initiate both existential and
general questions about the role of the possession in our
culture, the differentiations between public and private, and
the boundaries between the everyday life of the artist and his
studio practice. They continually bring up artistic problems,
which Slotawa has developed and explored in other bodies of
work.
In the small-format photographs showing
his studio space, the artist brings a heightened focus to the
identity and meaning of those things that punctuate our
immediate environment, and examines them in this instance with
the rooms of his workspace as a location of artistic
production. He systematically investigates the five rooms of
his Berlin studio. The rooms are simultaneously the object of
the images and the place of their formation: for the creation
of the baryte prints, Slotawa constructed a darkroom in his
studio. The neutral, economically straight-forward
black-and-white photographs - often only informative,
documentary views - show nearly empty rooms, and draw one's
attention to the objecthood of the building's structure, much
like the artist's exhibition "One After the Other" in
the Arthouse Austin (2007). Details such as the colour of the
walls, the door signs, electrical cables or spots on the floor
catch the eye - structures and traces of earlier use, which
the artist did not erase upon occupying the space. Slotawa
uses the medium of photography in the sense of an extended
concept of sculpture, to visualize the interim and final
results of a comprehensive working process. Often the
photographs are, as in the case of his hotel series from
1998-99, the only visual manifestation of the sculptural
intervention. Here, in this new series, the studio photographs
are juxtaposed with the sculptural intervention in the gallery
space.
Florian Slotawa has ripped out pieces
of his studio's walls and transferred them to the gallery
space. During the duration of the exhibition, the physically
displaced architectural pieces are layered against the
storefront window, through which the gallery space opens onto
the street. The installation changes the usual spatial
impression of the gallery and conceptually links both the
artist's workspace and the exhibition space. Through this
unexpected intervention, our everyday perception of these
places and their fluctuating relationship to one another
becomes destabilized.
Florian Slotawa was born
in 1972 in Rosenheim, and currently lives and works in Berlin.
His solo exhibitions include P.S.1, MoMA, New York (2009);
"Solothurn aussen", Kunstverein Solothurn, (2008); "One After
the Other", Arthouse, Austin (2007); "Land gewinnen", Haus am
Waldsee, Berlin (2005); "Bonn ordnen", Bonner Kunstverein
(2004); and "Gesamtbesitz", Kunsthalle Mannheim (2002). He has
taken part in numerous group exhibitions, most recently
"Photodimensional", Museum of Contemporary Photography,
Chicago (2009) and "Interieur/Exterieur. Wohnen in der Kunst",
Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg (2008), as well as "Zwischen zwei
Toden", ZKM Karlsruhe and "Made in Germany", Sprengel Museum,
Hannover (both in 2007). His installation "Ersatzturm" was
presented in the 4th Berlin Biennale (2006), "Of Mice and
Men". Galerie Nordenhake worked with the artist in 2006 for
the group exhibition "Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore".
Image:
FLORIAN SLOTAWA
Wall Fragments Studio,
2009
Installation view
Courtesy of Galerie Nordenhake, Berlin
Galerie Nordenhake
Lindenstrasse
34
D - 10969 Berlin
+49 30 206 1483
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re-title.com - Independent directories of
emerging & professional contemporary art
Coming Next
December 16-17 Mixed / Multi Media
January 13-14 Photography, Film & Video
January 20-21 Painting /
Drawing January
27-28 Sculpture /
Installation
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BM Box 5163
London
WC1N 3XX
United
Kingdom
+44 (0) 870 922
0438 |
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