9 January - 14 February 2009

Alon Levin (New York/Den Haag) makes large-scale installations often made of wooden structures that refer to the systems of thinking we tend to take for granted. Philosophical, economical, and social theories of progress and growth, organizing principles, and ideas of modernist utopias are some of the recurring themes in his work. Levin examines the images, metaphors, and symbols that represent these concepts, and explores the contradictions and failings of their systems. The work can be seen as a narration about the buildup, breakdown, and possibly the reinvention of meaning itself.

Levin's method and aesthetic approach: in the beginning he establishes parameters and a course of action; then a process starts in which he reacts to, examines, and eventually playfully breaks these same parameters. Alon Levin develops modules of what appear to be color and image systems that are prevalent throughout his work. Basic forms like tower, spiral, arch and wheel continuously reoccur - all bearing the connotations of technical progress, movement and monumentality. The installations' overwhelming physical presence and the spatial quality they force onto the viewer establish a kind of logic that transforms the context and creates a momentary alternative reality. The structures have a material rawness and this underlines the transparency of the process and sketch-like nature of the installations.

In Postponed Modernism Alon Levin continues his ongoing series (ISCP, New York 2008 / STROOM, Den Haag 2008/ HVCCA, New York 2009) addressing Man's adoration for - and creation of - symbols, both in the tradition of Mythology as well as in the machinery of Nationalism.

In the center of the exhibition will be a colossal 'construction' that allows associations to the 'Great Wheel' of early world fairs, a hamster wheel, or perhaps an indoctrinating baby-mobile. The mechanical construction of the installation is self-evident, though it defies any clear purpose. This highly chromatic work, "Untitled, A Proposal for a Universe Under Control" will stand beside the massive black and white wall-construction, "A Large Inverted Standard Brain on the Wall". The imposing presence of these works is not there to celebrate any truth or man's achievement but rather confronts the viewer with the limitations of the 'box' it is in.

Postponed Modernism is the first solo exhibition of Alon Levin in Germany.

 

This exhibition was supported by: Koninkrijk der Nederlanden und Fonds BKVB.
 

 

KLEMM'S
Brunnenstraße 7
10119 Berlin
+49.30.40 50 49 53

 

 

 

 

30 January - 28 February 2009

 

Sprüth Magers London is delighted to present 'Objects on Pedestals', a survey of sculpture works by acclaimed Swiss artists Peter Fischli and David Weiss. The exhibition includes a selection from the series 'Rubber Sculptures' (1986 - 1988), which comprises a number of life-size black rubber casts of ordinary and commonplace objects, including a chest of drawers, a table, a candle and a cutlery tray. The exhibition also features a number of sculptures, all made in 2007 in unfired clay, which also depict normal and quotidian objects, such as a shoe or a jug, although on an exaggerated scale. Together, these two bodies of work reveal the artists' ongoing fascination with the banal and absurd qualities of the everyday, and the materiality and tactility of mass consumption.

Infused with Fischli & Weiss's characteristic wit and knowing irony, 'Rubber Sculptures' and the clay sculptures prompt intriguing questions about the form and function of the objects that facilitate modern living. The heavy black vulcanite rubber invokes a range of associations which sits at odds with the practical uses of the objects assembled, requiring the viewer to look askance at the everyday things that are on view. Industrial, durable, even kinky, the black rubber material gives the forms of these mundane items a disconcerting and fetishised quality, as plain and commonplace things bounce and bend in a way which ill suits their function or purpose, and are installed and scrutinised in the gallery space. As the objects are divested of any recognised utility, they become charged with an aesthetic and sensory resonance which, both through the anonymising effect of the black colouration, and the simultaneously seductive and repulsive tactile quality of the rubber, presents a disquieting and intriguing image of the domestic world.

The clay sculptures also featured in the exhibition similarly invite the viewer to re-examine the material culture of contemporary life. Like 'Rubber Sculptures', the material used to create the sculptures assembled offers the opportunity for an ironic gaze at the objects represented. By recreating out of delicate, fragile and crumbling clay a number of objects, such as an axe or a chain, which demand to be robust and resilient in order to be of any use, the items on view again establish a purely formal relationship with the viewer. The artists' practice of elevating useless objects into art is further heightened by the exaggerated scale of the sculptures. A clay shoe 52 cm in length cannot be worn, but can be venerated in a gallery context, as an icon of everyday life.

'Rubber Sculptures' and the clay sculptures build on a number of earlier works by Fischli & Weiss which exploited and explored the unnerving and amusing effects of using materials in incongruous ways. Their earliest collaboration, 'Wurstserie' (1979), comprised a series of photographs featuring dramatic, funny and distressing scenarios played out by sausages, cigarette butts and other sundries. These sculptures also exemplify the ethnographic scrutiny of the everyday that has animated the practice of Fischli and Weiss, in a wide array of different media, for almost three decades. From 'Sichtbare Welt' (1987-2000), their monumental archive of nearly 3,000 photographs of commonly observed objects and scenes, to their most recent work, a comprehensive and endlessly suggestive collection of 800 print advertisements entitled 'Sonne, Mond und Sterne', which is on view at Sprüth Magers Berlin until 31 January 2009, the art of Fischli and Weiss has continually been exercised by the myriad meanings that might be located in the ordinary world around us.

Both born in Zürich, Peter Fischli (1952) and David Weiss (1946) met in 1977 and began their artistic collaboration shortly after, in 1979. Their artwork has been the subject of many prominent solo exhibitions around the world including recent retrospectives at the Deichtorhallen, Hamburg (2008), Kunsthaus, Zürich (2007) and Tate Modern, London (2006). In 2003, they represented Switzerland at the Venice Biennale for the third time.

Monika Sprüth Philomene Magers London
7A Grafton Street
London W1S 4EJ
+44 (0) 207 4081613

 

 

 

January 16 - February 14 2009

Survey- to examine carefully and thoroughly, and record (in unconventional ways but in particular detail) the features and conditions of (a building) (an area of land) (a sequence of thoughts) (a group of people) (a relation between objects) (what happens next...)

Will Cruickshank makes insouciant objects that react to the viewer with a deep, deadpan comedy. They are faux-scientific experiments in weight, movement, balance and human activity. A shopping basket of pansies, greeting you at the entrance to his 2007 Coleman Projects exhibition, slides up out of reach as you approach - connected by a system of pulleys that stretch up over the roof of the 3-storey building, to a mirror-object in the back yard. Cruickshank is an inventor-artist in the mould of Panamarenko, but responsive to environment and context, and with a generous sense of the absurd. Cruickshank's site-specific activities include converting a broken bicycle into a mobile free hot-chocolate stall in Zhongdian, Yunnan, China. For Standpoint, he will welcome visitors into the building with a tune.

Will Cruickshank's projects and performances include Columbo at Coleman Projects, London and Wheelbarrow Piano, Pallas Contemporary Projects, Dublin, Ireland in 2008; solo show The Shampoo at Studio 1.1, London, and residency at Golden Dragon Street Studios, Zhongdian, Yunnan, China in 2007.

Thomas Haywood's 'Family' is a photographic body of work that has been developing over the last five years, exploring the nature of family relations, associations with place, and ideas of belonging. Although Haywood has never lived in Denmark, his mother is Danish, and throughout his life he has visited often. The series builds a visual affinity with images that are familiar but dislocating. One image has only a tangential relation to the next, but taken together they imply a familiar, damp rural expanse of waiting and looking, with people nearby if not in the frame. This 'knowledge' emerges as much from Haywood's aesthetic debt to the semi-rural surburbia of film and television as it does to the viewer's personal memories. As in the series 'Island" (RCA 2008), Haywood's technique aspires to visual containment of a milieu - the understanding that comes from viewing a thing from all different angles, over and over again.

Thomas Haywood graduated MA RCA photography in 2008, and was awarded the Photographers' Gallery Prize for photography. His series 'Island,' was featured in Source Magazine, Issue 55.

In Measures at Normal Null, Ulrike Mohr calculated the highest and deepest publicly accessible places in Berlin, and redefined the median as Normal Null (the usual orientation being sea level), thus rendering a large part of the city into the negative, minus zone. Mohr's concentration on systems of position location refer as much to sociology as geography - what is my position in this system; what is my place in the ranking, provided I appear there at all; where are the gaps in my network; am I inside or outside again? For the 5th Berlin Biennial, Mohr relocated several scrubby, self-seeded trees from the roof of the the Palast der Republic (former GDR parliament building) to the Neue Nationalgalerie, but this proved (metaphorically, if not aesthetically satisfactorily) impossible; the trees were replanted in the Skulpturenpark and represented by wall-drawings in the gallery space. Working with materials sourced from the local environment, Mohr will be making a new conceptual installation piece for Standpoint.

Ulrike Mohr's recent projects include solo shows at Cluster Gallery, Berlin, and a public art project at Kunsthaus Kloster Gravehorst, as well as featuring in When things cast no shadow - the 5th Berlin Biennial (all 2008); her solo show Definitionen was at Kunstverein Hildesheim in 2007.

 

 

 

 

Standpoint Gallery
45 Coronet Street
London N1 6HD
+44 207 739 4921

Read On... Standpoint Gallery

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

10 January - 14 February 2009

 

 

 

 

 

The Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art is pleased to announce the exhibition opening of the museum's Artist-in-Residence, Karen Sargsyan, on Sunday February 8th, 2009.  There will be a gallery talk at 4:00 pm with a reception to follow.  Sargsyan is an Armenian artist residing in Holland and the recipient of the prestigious 2008 Thieme Award for the most promising new artist.  He is known for creating elaborate figurative installations using paper.  The artist began a three-month residency in October 2008, during which he has worked at the Hat Factory in Peekskill to produce his new installation "Abroad Understanding" for HVCCA's mezzanine gallery.

"Abroad Understanding" Is a room size installation that tells the story of an overthrown king.  Like actors on a theater's stage, Sargsyan's life-size figurative sculptures depict a theatrical scene of politics and power.  The paper figures are symbolically arranged in contorted poses, highly suggestive of dance movements frozen in time and reminiscent of classic Baroque sculpture and dramatic gestures to provide energy and movement to a work.  In the center of the installation sits an anonymous King on the floor, leaning up against his throne, dying, flanked by his once loyal and devoted subjects. The clothes hang in layers around their bodies, appear frayed, and eaten away.  They might be costumes from long-gone ages, with puffy balloon trousers and sleeves, high rolled collars, head ornaments, frilled skirts, capes and loose, draped pieces of fabric.  The images are part of a broader narrative in which the expressions stamped on the faces of the participants emote feelings of pain, of bacchanalian delight, of ecstasy.  The viewer is drawn not so much into the narrative as into the pathos of the interrelationships as well as the solitariness of the human condition.  

For Sargsyan, this existentialist search for the true and good core of humanity is fundamental, and god and man (the large and small figures) are two sides of the same coin.  "I look at the influences that affect people the same way that I look at a theatrical production," says Sargsyan.  "I want my work to reflect this play or game, but I also want to show the reduction and the purification.  My work is not a static image.  It shows an active process that expresses this 'cleaning up' My installations are a play in which the protagonists try to wipe 'the factories' off the playing field, as if the protagonists were holy beings in a theatrical production."

Karen Sargsyan was born in Yerevan, Armenia in 1973 and currently lives and works in Amsterdam. He studied at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten/Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science, Amsterdam, NL in 2006-2007 and Atelier Winston Huisman, Arnhem, NL in 1999-2001. In 2007 he received the Thieme Art Award and a fellowship with the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs/DCO/IC, NL in 2006. Recent 2008 solo exhibitions include 'The Theory of Art', Buro Leeuwarden, Leeuwarden, NL, and Suzie Q Projects, Bob van Orsow Gallery, Zurich, SW. Upcoming 2009 exhibitions include a group exhibition at The Museum of Arts and Design, New York and 'Stressed Shelter' at KW14, s-Hertogenbosch, Netherlands. Karen is represented by Galerie Juliètte Jongma in Amsterdam.

This exhibition was made possible by generous support from The Netherlands Foundation for Visual Arts, Design and Architecture (Fonds BKVB).

Image:
Karen Sargsyan: Abroad Understanding (detail of work in process), 2008
Metal, paper, wood, 98 x 248 x 224"
Courtesy of the Artist.
 
 
HUDSON VALLEY CENTER FOR CONTEMPORARY ART
1701 Main Street PO Box 209
Peekskill, New York 10566
+1 914.788.0100

 

Read On... HUDSON VALLEY CENTER FOR CONTEMPORARY ART

 

 

 

 

24 Jan 2009 to 28 Feb 2009

 

Nadania Idriss New Glass Art & Photography is pleased to present Lyrics in Glass, a solo exhibition featuring the work by Simone Neidhard. Lyrics in glass is a composition of fragile, lyrical prose uniting one object to the next in a poetic manner.
 
Simone Neidhard brilliantly uses glass as a substrate for reciting the narrative.  Traditional symbols are reduced and juxtaposed so that the viewer cannot decode the meaning, yet has an instinctive understanding of the experience.  "Mondrian Melting" stirs up a well-known image, while at the same time playing with the characteristics of glass, a material that is both transparent but able to fill an empty space.  Like many of the installations in Lyrics in Glass, "Katharsis" is significantly reduced to symbols, but tells a story of injury and healing through soft, fragmented words. 
 
Born in Münster, Germany, Simone Neidhard studied philosophy and Russian Literature at the Freie University in Berlin.  Between 1989 and 1995, she studied art at the Hochschule für Angewandte Kunst in Vienna and the Kunsthochschule Berlin-Weißensee. Simone spent a year in Salamanca, Spain and was rewarded the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) scholarship to study in Mexico.  Today, Simone Neidhard lives and works in Freiberg, Germany.

 

 

Image:
Simone Neidhard

Detail of Oktopus & Mistel
Courtesy of Nadania Idriss New Glass Art & Photography

 

Nadania Idriss
New Glass Art & Photography
Linienstr. 154
10115 Berlin

 

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