23 February 2010 - 10 April 2010

February 27 - April 10, 2010

 

Elizabeth Dee is pleased to present Extraction, an exhibition of new collages, sculpture and wall installations by Meredyth Sparks, her second solo-show at the gallery.

 

Using the documentary photographs of her previous collages as a foundation, pieces that often incorporated images of musical and political figures from the 1970s and 1980s, Sparks introduces a new series of works on paper and stretched canvases in which the figure has largely disappeared. In the absence of these icons, extracted fragments and sections of collage material are imbued with a new and evocative signification, alongside the scanned aluminum foil and piles of glitter that have become Sparks' signature gesture. Reconfigured, the compositions function as residual imprints upon which Sparks has placed post-it notes, woodcuts and stitched fabric. The resulting collages and paintings, for which she has coined the neologism extractions, intimate the historical avant-garde and the gender-based innovations of the Pattern and Decoration movement, among others.

 

In several works, the figure re-enters through abstract, fabric forms, including both cut-out templates and cut-away pieces taken from clothing patterns. One colored acetate sculpture gathers all the components needed to make an entire outfit of clothing, while other fabric patterns include vinyl stencils derived from a Kasimir Malevich painting that Sparks has previously integrated into her collages and wall interventions. A life-size wall-piece presents an image of two women applying this vinyl pattern for Sparks' recent exhibition in Cologne (Projects in Art and Theory, 2009), providing another reminder of the labor-based preoccupations that function as a primary theme throughout the exhibition.

 

A three-paneled plywood structure, Untitled (2010), invokes a book, annotated and indexed, and serves to house a collection of mnemonic images, post-it notes and a video projected on its surface. The video captures the sunrise and sunset in Sparks' studio as light is cast over two photographs depicting found graffiti. While one line of graffiti proclaims "you cant erase history", the other, taken three months later of the same tag, is provocatively amended to read, "u can erase history". This dialectic-the desire to gain footing against time's inevitable passing-throws light on the delicate balance struck throughout Sparks' practice, where temporality and the aesthetic are under constant negotiation.

 

In addition to her 2008 solo exhibition at Elizabeth Dee, Sparks' work was featured in the two person exhibition Meredyth Sparks & Richard Aldrich that the gallery presented in 2007. Recent exhibitions include her 2009 solo shows at Projects in Art and Theory, Cologne, Galerie Catherine Bastide, Brussels and Galerie Frank Elbaz, Paris. Sparks' first monograph, with essays by Nicolas Bourriaud and Robert Hobbs, was published by Monografik Éditions in 2009.

 

 

 

March 6 to April 17, 2010

 

We are pleased to present a suite of new works by the Zurich-based artist Ian Anüll (*1948 in Sempach near Lucerne). Since the 1980s he has been regularly represented in museums and galleries both at home and abroad. Currently, an extensive exhibition covering the past two and a half decades of Anüll's work is on view at the Helmhaus in Zurich (February 5 - April 5, 2010) and beginning May 22, 2010, Urs Meile Gallery in Beijing will mount a presentation of important aspects of his oeuvre. Mai 36 Galerie has represented the artist since 1988.

 

Ian Anüll does not cultivate a personal signature, a ploy that deliberately undermines the cult of personality and the notion of the artist as genius. He draws, paints, takes pictures, shoots films and makes objects. He uses found pieces from consumerism and the mass media, subjecting them to sophisticated modifications that subtly transform their meaning as signs and symbols.

 

The letter R appears almost like a leitmotif in Anüll's oeuvre: as the symbol that designates a registered trademark, it stands for a consumer world governed by marketing. For instance, he placed the trademark ® on the base of a sculpture - a used, green designer chair issued by a Dutch studio in the 60s and early 70s - therefore making it not visible. In contrast, fashion labels sewed onto 56 canvases make an outspoken and conspicuous appearance. Measuring 40 x 50 cm, they are the approximate size of a man's chest. The artist had removed well-known and lesser-known fashion labels from men's and women's clothing and instead of discarding the clothing, he imprisoned it in two round cages with iron bars two metres high, standing on concrete bases. Another similarly witty and allusive installation consists of two old, extremely dilapidated highchairs on the backs of which he has inscribed the words «not art» and «copy» in Cyrillic lettering. Not only does this piece unmistakably reference Walter Benjamin's discourse on the technical reproducibility of the work of art, it also demonstrates the artist's penchant for upsetting our value system by turning garbage into a work of art, thereby revaluating and upgrading it. Toxic securities as waste products are the subject matter of L'odeur et l'argent. A whiskey glass filled with perfume is placed next to a decanter stuffed full of bank notes cut into snippets. The associative potential is almost unlimited, ranging from Jeremias Gotthelf's novel Geld und Geist (Money and Mind) to Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytical analogies involving money, power and excrement.

 

Attaching a label to a work of art reduces it to a mere commodity. Using such artistic devices and contextual shifts, Anüll exposes the mechanics of the art trade. But no matter what path he chooses to follow, he is inevitably a cog in a system that goes hand-in-hand with a manifest trademark mentality. This he gleefully exploits in his send-up of the art market. In order to make a dent in that same market, he has to bow to a system that calls for strategic positioning by way of a trademark - a procedure which is even more imperative in his case since he refuses to submit an artistic signature of his own. Hence, nothing could be more appropriate than to put the ubiquitous trademark ® on his flags and declare it to be his own registered trademark.
[Text: Dominique von Burg]

 

 

CRG Gallery
535 W 22 ST
New York, NY10011
+1 (212) 229-2766