Contemporary Art Daily

Georg Herold at Gerhardsen Gerner

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 19:45:29 +0000

Artist: Georg Herold

Venue: Gerhardsen Gerner, Oslo

Date: May 8 – June 2013

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Full gallery of images, press release and link available after the jump.

Images:

Images courtesy Gerhardsen Gerner, Oslo. Photos by Øystein Thorvaldsen.

Press Release:

Gerhardsen Gerner Oslo is pleased to announce its first exhibition with German artist Georg Herold (b. 1947).

At the age of thirty Georg Herold may have been exposed to his strongest influences during his studies at Hochschule der Bildenden Künste in Hamburg under Sigmar Polke and Franz Erhard Walther in the late 1970s.
He found the point for his starting work in Hamburg. When violence escalated in West Germany in the German Autumn of 1977, Herold presented his first work “Präsentation der ersten Latte” (Presentation of the first lath) at the academy in Hamburg. The roof laths as the material and content undermined all expectations of either aesthetically or politically interpretable art.
Herold’s technique of setting traps is perhaps inconceivable without the “art punk” once cultivated jointly with Albert and Markus Oehlen, Werner Büttner and Martin Kippenberger nor without Duchamp’s linguistic compositions including sexuality as a metaphor.

Apart from roof laths and caviar beads that typify Herold’s work, he has repeatedly used bricks, thread, buttons and nails as well as tea strainers, handbags, nylon tights and carpets. In addition to sculptures and paintings, Herold’s extensive oeuvre also includes installations and video works. His varied body of works refers laconically to art history, which he quotes in an ironic and striking manner, so that unexpected new perspectives emerge.

For his show at Gerhardsen Gerner Oslo, Georg Herold presents a group of wooden sculptures, all „untitled“, roof laths nailed together on delicate iron bars that form a pictorial figuration at second glance; a large bronze sculpture alongside a selection of the so called brick-paintings and caviar-pictures. Standing in front of the large scale sculpture in the main exhibition room, one can sense the original simple elements of roof laths once screwed together that now form a skinny human body made of bronze. The figure has a twisted and sexualised posture as if having fallen down and having its left arm being caught underneath its torso. This is contrasted with a selection of caviar-pictures which visualize portraits of Wolfgang Pauli, Ernst Bloch and Bertrand Russell by numbering the fish eggs. Since 1989, Herold has been using caviar in his pictures as a visual material for the production of both figurative and abstract paintings, frequently numbering the seemingly countless individual grain of caviar.

The canvases entitled Rumsfeld (2004), Red Square (2005) and Platz des himmlischen Friedens (2005) look like they might collapse under its heavy burden of red bricks and yet challenge the conventions of painting. Appearing as motifs of a composition which seem to deny gravity, they become alien to their original use to build homes for the petite bourgeoisie. By the use of such ‘poor’ materials in conjunction with wit, irony and humor, Herold is playing with the viewer’s perception both in content and form.

Georg Herold once summed up: “My choice of materials is not subject to any conscious aesthetic criteria. The materials must merely be able to absorb and transport my ideas. I do not use materials that speak their own language as a matter of principle. That’s why I look for raw, dumb materials that don’t pose any questions.”

Link: Georg Herold at Gerhardsen Gerner

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Anna Ostoya and Barbara Leoniak at Bortolami

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 17:45:49 +0000

Artist: Anna Ostoya and Barbara Leoniak

Venue: Bortolami, New York

Exhibition Title: Disclosures

Date: May 3 – June 22, 2013

Note: The text accompanying this exhibition is viewable here

Click here to view slideshow

Full gallery of images, press release and link available after the jump.

Images:

Images courtesy of Bortolami, New York

Press Release:

Bortolami is pleased to announce the exhibition Disclosures, featuring new works by Anna Ostoya and Barbara Leoniak. As the centerpieces of her second show at the gallery, Ostoya presents four paintings and a text piece. Leoniak, who was invited by Ostoya to collaborate on the show, presents a series of six sculptures.

Painted over a period of two years, Ostoya’s works are semi-abstract compositions in oil on canvas. The artist based them on both reproductions of figurative works by early 20th century artists and a snapshot of a recent social situation involving an eminent art-historian and a distinguished artist. Ostoya’s text piece Disclosures (Text) presents her desires for the exhibition and the ideas that shaped it.

Leoniak’s sculptures respond to Ostoya’s sources. Modeled using strips of cardboard dipped in resin, they reinterpret Ostoya’s imagery through another medium and sensibility. While Ostoya’s paintings fragment the appropriated figures, Leoniak’s sculptures reconstitute them as fanciful anthropomorphic fillets.

The show embraces a modernist tradition of object-based art, yet it aims to situate each work in a dialogue with its spatial and conceptual context. The works can be viewed as autonomous paintings and sculptures, but they can also be seen in relation to each other and to Disclosures (Text). In this way, the overall constellation surpasses the meaning of any single piece and the intentions of either artist.

The works in this show also revisit key moments in the history of the avant-garde, but they belie that history’s rhetoric of discontinuity and rupture. While the historic works, the key objects of appropriation, represent important episodes of vanguard criticality, Ostoya and Leoniak both embrace and subvert this tradition. They impishly mock the avant-garde “boys’ club” while acknowledging its social and political relevance in an age of inequality and unrest.

Underlying this whole endeavor is a belief in continuity. The dialogues between these paintings and sculptures as well as between the objects and text reflect a deeper commonality of voices and ideas. The contributions of each artist are manifestly distinct, but they are never univocal. Although Leoniak was Ostoya’s first artistic mentor, the exhibition presents this relationship as polymorphous and non-hierarchical. Just as their appropriations of modern art emphasize recurrence over formal innovation, their dialogue places artistic continuity and communication over Oedipal competition.Such engagements seek to redefine artistic practice as inherently collaborative and to present the history of art as a conversation rather than a sequence of monologues.

Anna Ostoya is an artist living in Brooklyn. She graduated from the Whitney Independent Study Program in 2009. Her work has appeared in Manifesta 7, Rovereto, the 2nd Athens Biennial, and other exhibitions internationally. It will also be included in the forthcoming show New Photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Barbara Leoniak is an artist living in Cracow. She graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts there in 1977. Her work was shown internationally in the 1980s, and she received a golden leaf medal, in 1985, and a silver metal, in 1990, at the Winter Sculpture Salon in Warsaw.

Link: Anna Ostoya and Barbara Leoniak at Bortolami

Esko Männikkö & Pekka Turunenat at Nordenhake

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 12:15:55 +0000

Artists: Esko Männikkö & Pekka Turunenat

Venue: Nordenhake, Berlin

Exhibition Title: PEMOHT

Date: April 27– June 22, 2013

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Full gallery of images, press release and link available after the jump.

Images:

Images courtesy of Nordenhake, Berlin

Press Release:

Galerie Nordenhake is pleased to present PEMOHT, an exhibition by Finnish photographers Esko Männikkö and Pekka Turunen. The title takes its’ name from a photographic essay realised by the two artists in conjunction over a seven year period between 1989 and 1995. This significant series has been reassembled by the artists and can now be seen in its’ almost integrality. This will also be the first time both artists will be shown together in a gallery context.

The title PEMOHT refers to the Cyrillic script for the Russian word Remont – a term which can be translated as reparation and stands as the euphemistic and tragic symbol for the collapse of a country and the subsequent failure of its’ institutions, devices and social structures. Within the immediate wake of the Soviet Union’s dissolution the two photographers travelled to the Kola Peninsula, a remote area on the border of northern Finland. At the beginning of the Soviet period the peninsula was heavily industrialised and militarised, largely due to its’ strategic position and the discovery of the vast nickel and heavy metal deposits in the 1920s. As a result, the ecology of the area suffered major ecological damage, including contamination by military nuclear waste and nickel smelting.

Set against the bleak backdrop of this violated area, Männikkö and Turunen’s colour photographs set out to document the everyday reality of a disenfranchised community living on the margins during times of major transition. A haunting document of post-Soviet living conditions, PEMOHT captures this new reality with poetry, clarity and grit.

Esko Männikkö was born in 1959 in Pudasjärvi in the Northern part of Finland. He lives and works in Oulu. In 2014 he will have a survey exhibition at the Kunsthalle Helsinki. He was awarded the prestigious Deutsche Börse Photography Prize in 2008 and has been showing at Galerie Nordenhake since 1995. Solo exhibitions include Millesgården, Lidingö, Kulturens hus, Luleå, Bomuldsfabriken Kunsthall, Arendal (all 2009), Finsk-Norsk Kulturinstitutt, Oslo (2004), the Hasselblad Center, Gothenburg (1999), the Malmö Konsthall (1997), as well as Portikus, Frankfurt/Main (1996) amongst others. He has also taken part in numerous group exhibitions such as “Investigations of a Dog” at Magasin 3 and Deste Foundation (2010), as well as the Venice Biennial (2005), Liverpool Biennial (2004), “Contemporary Photography II: Anti-Memory,” Yokohama Museum of Art (2000), São Paulo Biennial (1998) and Johannesburg Biennial (1997).

Pekka Turunen was born in 1958 and currently lives in Kemiönsaari, Finland. He is currently working on five new artist’s books and has previously published “Against the Wall: Lypö, Tilkkanen, Mörsky and I”, 1995, “Collected Works”, 1999 and “Every Object Tells a Story”, 2004 amongst others. His photographs have also been shown widely, recent solo exhibitions include Villa Lande, Kemiö, Söderlångvik Museum, Dragsfjärd (2004), Finnland-Institut, Berlin (2003) and Musée de Normandie, Caen (2002). He took part in the 11th Sydney Biennale in 1999 and has participated in numerous group exhibitions since.

Link: Esko Männikkö & Pekka Turunenat at Nordenhake

“Death by Water. Death by Fire.” at Campoli Presti

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 19:45:08 +0000

Artists: Lucy Dodd, Jutta Koether, Nora Schultz, Viola Yeşiltaç

Venue: Campoli Presti, Paris

Exhibition Title: Death by Water. Death by Fire.

Date: May 17 – June 22, 2013

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Full gallery of images, press release and link available after the jump.

Images:

Images courtesy of Campoli Presti, London/Paris

Press Release:

Campoli / Presti is pleased to present a show of work by four artists. Four artists: Four elements. Four walls, too. But the exhibit emphasizes mainly two: Water and fire. Water first–then fire. Not to the exclusion of earth or air, ever (how would that even be possible?) but the final fantasy here is the ringing sea. The idea being to associate the technologies of writing, and with them all the related technologies of painting, with water and watery transformation; then to add to this not only the memory of two inscriptions on two Anglophone tombs but also the image (the flicker of an icon) of a curtain of flames rising above the waves. It’s suave mari magno versus et in arcadia ego, all over again.

“This Grave / contains all that was Mortal / of a / Young English Poet / Who / on his Death Bed, in the Bitterness of his Heart / at the Malicious Power of his Enemies / Desired / these Words to be / engraved on his Tomb Stone: / Here lies One / Whose Name was writ in Water. 24 February 1821″

Lucy Dodd was born in 1981 in Garden City, New York. Dodd received her BFA from Art Center College of Design in 2004 and her MFA from Bard College in 2011. Dodd has been featured in numerous group shows both nationally and internationally, including Blum & Poe, Los Angeles; Meyer Kainer, Vienna; and Balice Hertling & Lewis, New York. Dodd had her first solo show at ProChoice in Vienna in 2010, and, together with musician Sergei Tcherepnin, she was part of Performa 11 in New York in 2011.

Based in Berlin and New York, Jutta Koether is also a professor at the Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg. As a musician, she has worked with artists such as Tony Conrad, John Miller, Tom Verlaine, Kim Gordon and the late Steven Parrino (as Electrophilia). Recent exhibitions include the Whitney Biennial and Sao Paulo Biennial, both 2012, and solo exhibitions at the Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2011), and the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (2009). Her work was recently included in the Tate Modern exhibition A Bigger Splash: Painting after Performance. Her solo exhibition Seasons and Sacraments is currently on view at Arnolfini Bristol, after being exhibited at DCA, Dundee.

Nora Schultz recently had solo exhibitions at Portikus, Frankfurt (2012); Bloomberg Space, London (2011); Fondazione Giuliani, Rome (2010) and Koelnischer Kunstverein, Cologne (2009). Past group exhibitions include Version Control at Arnolfini, Bristol (2013), Ecstatic Alphabets/Heaps of Language at MoMA, New York (2012), That’s The Way We Do It at Kunsthaus Bregenz (2011), Non-Solo Show, Non-Group Show at Kunsthalle Zurich (2009), Collatéral at Confort Moderne, Poitiers (2009) and Nora Schultz / Pernille Kapper Williams at Grazer Kunstverein (2009). Schultz’ work will be included in the upcoming group exhibition I knOw yoU at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin.

Viola Yeşiltaç has exhibited works in solo and group exhibitions including Balice Hertling and Lewis, Catherine Bastide Gallery, Brussels; Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle; Am Nuden Da, London; Kunstverein Langenhagen, Bundeskunstshalle, Bonn; Kunsthalle Recklinghausen, Museum Folkwang, Essen; Sommerakademie Centrum Paul Klee, Bern; Sculpture Center, New York; Artists Space, New York, P.S.1.Contemporary Art Center, New York; Front Desk Apperatus, New York; Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Geneva; Galleria Civica di Arte Contemporanea, Trento; and Team 404 & John Armleder Museum of Modern Art, Shanghai.

Link: “Death by Water. Death by Fire.” at Campoli Presti

Alexandra Bircken at BQ

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 17:45:26 +0000

Artist: Alexandra Bircken

Venue: BQ, Berlin

Exhibition Title: Inside out

Date: April 27 – June 22, 2013

Click here to view slideshow

Full gallery of images, press release and link available after the jump.

Images:

Images courtesy of BQ, Berlin

Press Release:

During the Berlin Gallery Weekend 2013, BQ presents Alexandra Bircken’s solo exhibition “Inside out”.

In her fourth solo show with BQ, Alexandra Bircken tracks the inconsistencies of the dialectics of the Interior and the Exterior by questioning the traditional separation of cover and substance in relation to form and meaning, and by dissecting integrated forms into slices. For example, there is a glass case containing the multipart piece “Bruststück”, a fragmented cast of a female chest that consists of several cast layers of latex. The largest part represents the complete left side of the chest; with breast, décolleté and parts of stomach and shoulder; the right side has been cut into pieces the interface of which reveals the “skin” and the deeper layers that resemble fat, flesh and ribs. The string vest that enwraps both the left chest piece and the surface of the smaller fragments reminds of a sausage netting and thus seemd to reduce the human body to anonymous meat; on the other hand, the obvious form of a vest emphasizes the human/female shape, thus functioning as an identity-generating form.

This function of clothing – to generate individuality as a deliberate definition of boundaries towards the exterior – is also illustrated by a torso and cut body fragments made of wax-covered clothes: the outer textile layer here appears as the flesh of the body, as the fragments of subjectivity. Similar to the dissected fragments of “Bruststück”, the horizontal interfaces of these doubles of the body reveal their formation. Within the ambivalent structure of such an interface, dichotomies like interior and exterior, substance and surface, depth and plane collide and collapse. At the interface, that which is not visible and hidden turns inside out and forms two-dimensional but complex patterns that transgress themselves by referring back to the originally hidden as its trace. At the same time, they mark the lack of an embracing surface that sustains the illusion of integrity, unity and identity, and reveal a wound.

Opposed to these heterogeneous interfaces that are characterized by holes and passages, the exhibition also includes a bronze cast of rudimental sex doll. Deprived of its head, arms and lower legs, it resembles an amputated body. Different parts of the cast even bear traces of seams and stitching that manifest the fetishistic reconstruction work of an integrated double sustaining imaginary identification, rather than exposing the fragmentary condition of the subject. The mirroring, intact material of the sex doll cast as well as further bronze casts of the interior of its artificial orifices – technoid and phalloformous objects – thwart the complex and layered figures, as they merely function as projections of the beholder. Another opposite of the prosthetic cast bodies can be found in a hollow piece with two openings that is covered with tights. Whereas the material of the tights forms hanging tentacles on the outside, it composes a spiral cave reminding of an umbilicus inside the larger opening. When having a closer look, one finds that this umbilical fold is another interface the structure of which evokes technical apparatus such as engines, rotors and turbines. It establishes a link with fragments of a dissected motorbike that is presented in slices, just as the doubles of the body. Together with a stuffed motorcycle suit, dismembered and stuffed sleeves and legs, the reconstructing view of the beholder makes it transform into a hybrid between human and technology – into a technoid centaur that combines the different aspects of the exhibition.

Simultaneously, an installation by Alexanrda Bircken is on display at the Pavillon of the Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz (vis-à-vis the gallery). The interior of the theatre’s glass pavilion is filled with a large balloon that functions as an artificial, prosthetic lung and thus oscillates between a technical, pneumatic tool and a bodily organ.

Link: Alexandra Bircken at BQ

Colter Jacobsen at Corvi-Mora

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 12:15:21 +0000

Artist: Colter Jacobsen

Venue: Corvi-Mora, London

Exhibition Title: (…ellipsis)

Date: April 18 – June 15, 2013

Click here to view slideshow

Full gallery of images, press release and link available after the jump.

Images:

Images courtesy of Corvi-Mora, London. Photos by Marcus Leith.

Press Release:

Tommaso Corvi-Mora is pleased to present an exhibition of new work by Colter Jacobsen, his third at the gallery. The exhibition will include new works on paper and a site-specific work.

Your smile is a ham-
Mock I’ll take a nap
In.     Palm
Trees on fire leanin’
In      on    me.
Two                   Rip
Van Winkles share
The same beard sleep-
In’
For a hundred years.
The half-do-
                          me was once
A whole-dome
Worn glacially.
In the quick
Ness of the dusk in
The quickness of
The dusk

There is a light
I only see you
in.

-Rocksteady, by Coconut

Link: Colter Jacobsen at Corvi-Mora

Week in Review: June 16, 2013

Sun, 16 Jun 2013 22:00:57 +0000

Welcome to Week in Review, our Sunday round-up of the last 7 days of activity here at Contemporary Art Daily. Please subscribe to our RSS feed, follow us on Twitter, follow us on Tumblr, and become a fan on Facebook.

We would like to thank our sponsor The Renaissance Society, a not-for-profit contemporary art museum on the campus of the University of Chicago, offering a photography portfolio of works by important artists including Darren Almond, Lothar Baumgarten, Jean-Marc Bustamante, Willie Doherty, Stan Douglas, Fischli/Weiss, Rodney Graham, Arturo Herrera, Zoe Leonard, Laura Letinsky, Thomas Struth, and Jeff Wall. Proceeds from the photography portfolio will benefit the museum’s exhibitions and program.

This week’s featured exhibitions:

Maria Lassnig at Capitain Petzel

Tomma Abts at Daniel Buchholz

Guy Mees at Valentin

“The Lie and the PowerPoint” at Shanaynay

Venice: Marisa Merz at The Central Pavilion

Venice: Walter De Maria at The Arsenale

Venice: Varda Caivano at The Central Pavilion

Venice: “Kamikaze Loggia” at The Georgian Pavilion

Venice: Enrico David at The Central Pavilion

Venice: Henrik Olesen at The Central Pavilion

Venice: Sarah Lucas at The Central Pavilion

Venice: James Lee Byars at The Central Pavilion

Venice: Mark Manders at The Dutch Pavilion

Venice: Carol Rama at The Arsenale

Venice: John Bock at The Arsenale

Venice: Hans Josephsohn at The Arsenale

Venice: Danh Vo at The Arsenale

Venice: James Richards at The Arsenale

Venice: Daniel Hesidence at The Arsenale

Venice: Geta Brătescu at The Central Pavilion

Venice: Harun Farocki at The Arsenale

Venice: Simon Denny at The Arsenale

Venice: Lynette Yiadom-Boakye at The Central Pavilion

Venice: Jos de Gruyter and Harald Thys at The Arsenale

Venice: Pamela Rosenkranz at The Arsenale

Venice: Trisha Donnelly at The Arsenale

Venice: Rudolf Stingel at Palazzo Grassi

Venice: Yüksel Arslan at The Arsenale

Venice: Christopher Williams at The Arsenale

Venice: Katrín Sigurdardóttir at The Icelandic Pavilion

Venice: Lawrence Weiner at Palazzo Bembo

Venice: Mathias Poledna at The Austrian Pavilion

Have an excellent week.

Venice: Mathias Poledna at The Austrian Pavilion

Sun, 16 Jun 2013 20:00:06 +0000

Artist: Mathias Poledna

Venue: The Austrian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale

Exhibition Title: Imitation of Life

Date: June 1 – November 24, 2013

Click here to view slideshow

Images:

Images courtesy of Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne. Photos by Contemporary Art Daily and Daniele Resini.

Press Release:

For his exhibition in the Austrian Pavilion at the 55th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia, artist Mathias Poledna presents a new work titled Imitation of Life.

A 35mm color film roughly three minutes in length, Imitation of Life was produced using the historic, labor-intensive technique of handmade animation and is built around a cartoon character performing a musical number. Its buoyant spirit and visual texture evoke the Golden Era of the American animation industry during the late 1930s and early 1940s. In the preceding years, the time of the Great Depression, the medium had evolved from a crude form of mass spectacle into a visual language of enormous richness and complexity that shaped and continues to resonate in our collective imaginary.

Imitation of Life appropriates and reassembles this language as it revisits the contradictions and ambiguities that accompanied the medium’s development. Advanced methods of production and visual ingenuity—indebted to the syntax of European modernism in its handling of surface, depth and color, and lauded by the avant-garde and critic intelligence of the time—coexisted with sentimental characterization and storytelling based on age-old fables and fairy tales.

Among the most pronounced features of the film is the extreme contrast between the conciseness of its scene, and the extraordinary amount of labor that went into its creation: more than 5,000 handmade sketches, layouts, animation drawings, watercolored backgrounds and ink-rendered animation cells, produced in close cooperation with acclaimed artists from the animation departments of film studios in Los Angeles, most notably Disney. Several small groups of these drawings are presented in the Austrian Pavilion.

The soundtrack, another key element of the production, was recorded with a full orchestra in the style of the period at the Warner Brothers scoring stage in Los Angeles. It combines new original music created specifically for this project with a rearrangement of a popular song from the 1930s written by Arthur Freed and Nacio Herb Brown.

Presented in Venice, Poledna’s installation allows for a complex cross-reading with other episodes from this period: the relationship between European art and American mass culture; European emigration to the United States and American export to Europe; the presentation of animated films produced by the Disney Studios at the first film festivals in Venice; the late modernism of the Austrian Pavilion, and the period from 1938 to 1942 during which the building remained empty while Austrian artists exhibited in the German Pavilion.

On behalf of the Austrian Federal Ministry for Education, the Arts and Culture.

Link: Venice: Mathias Poledna at The Austrian Pavilion

Venice: Lawrence Weiner at Palazzo Bembo

Sun, 16 Jun 2013 18:00:20 +0000

Artist: Lawrence Weiner

Venue: Palazzo Bembo, Venice

Exhibition Title: The Grace of a Gesture

Date: June 1 – November 24, 2013

Click here to view slideshow

Images:

Photos by Contemporary Art Daily

Press Release:

The Grace of a Gesture, an artwork by Lawrence Weiner, forms the centerpiece of this exhibition organized by the Written Art Foundation with the support of Berenberg Art Advice. It is presented on the ground floor of the Palazzo Bembo near the Rialto Bridge. As a Collateral Event of the 55th International Art Exhibition – la Biennale di Venezia, an extended component will be the installation of The Grace of a Gesture in ten different languages ranging from Chinese to Arabic to Hebrew installed on five of Venice’s major sources of transportation, the Vaporetto. The boats will transport the work through Venice on the Canale Grande, to the Arsenale, the Giardini and beyond. The Grace of a Gesture is a work from 2010, whose muse was the Portuguese city of Lisbon. The exhibition at Palazzo Bembo includes four additional works by Weiner, initially created for his 1991 exhibition, DISPLACEMENT, at Dia Center for the Arts in New York City.

The works from DISPLACEMENT are concerned with various materials used to make art and their displacement. For the engag- ed viewer, a fascinating process can take shape when looking at these works: one can ‘see’ materials—cadmium, mud, titanium for example—with quantities, pounds or yards, that with a ‘change of state’ can be displaced ‘in a like amount of some mass not itself’… With volume, color, weight, this process can lead to changes of state, of value. The mix, displaced, leads to a completion, or a whole.

Link: Venice: Lawrence Weiner at Palazzo Bembo

Venice: Katrín Sigurdardóttir at The Icelandic Pavilion

Sun, 16 Jun 2013 16:00:04 +0000

Artist: Katrín Sigurdardóttir

Venue: The Icelandic Pavilion at the Venice Biennale

Exhibition Title: Foundation

Date: June 1 – November 24, 2013

Click here to view slideshow

Images:

Photos by Contemporary Art Daily

Press Release:

For the Pavilion of Iceland at the 55th International Art Exhibition – la Biennale di Venezia in 2013, Katrín Sigurdardóttir has designed a large-scale sculptural intervention for the Lavanderia—The Old Laundry at Palazzo Zenobio. The artist has created a floating platform covered by an ornate, baroque-inspired design, measuring approximately 90 square meters. The outline of the architectural structure takes its form from the footprint of a typical 18th century pavilion. It intersects both interior and exterior spaces of this auxiliary building in the garden of the Palace, with two sets of stairs for access by visitors. The project is born from a career-long exploration of distance and memory and their embodiments in architecture, urbanism, cartography, and landscape. Sigurdardóttir’s work often includes highly detailed renditions of places, both real and fictional, that incorporate an element of surprise. The piece will travel to the Reykjavík Art Museum and then to the SculptureCenter in Long Island City, New York. Sigurdardóttir will adapt the sculpture to the new architecture of each location, yet it will maintain its original footprint as well as the cut-out memory of the walls of the previous sites.

Upon entering the work, visitors will first climb the stairs leading from the garden to the platform, and then bend down to pass through the truncated doors of the building. The work extends beyond the confines of the Lavanderia’s walls on three sides and allows the public to navigate diverse interior and exterior spaces. Visitors can also climb stairs to the roof of the building and look down on the sculpture’s large footprint and intricate patterns. The size of this architectural piece dwarfs the building, and thus takes on a familiar theme in Sigurdardóttir’s oeuvre, the playful manipulation of scale. Notably, Iceland lacks its own pavilion in the Giardini, and therefore the floating, disembodied structure of Sigurdardóttir’s sculpture takes on a special significance. The outline of the form becomes a metaphor for the outline of the national space.

By superimposing an elevated, highly decorative surface onto the Lavanderia, Sigurdardóttir brings the two buildings, the pavilion and the laundry, together. The pavilion, symbolizing the opulence and leisure of the owner, is contrasted by the laundry’s associations with labor. The surface of the platform replicates artisanal tile construction and is handmade by the artist and her team. Sigurdardóttir chose to use art materials instead of traditional flooring materials to emphasize the understanding of the surface as a sculpture that the viewer walks upon and wears down with every step.

Katrín Sigurdardóttir explains, “This work is about drawing. It’s about labor, and it’s about spatial immersion. I wanted to create a work that could be entered from different points, navigated in multiple ways, and viewed from several levels, so that the visitor is both in the work and at the same time able to observe herself in the work. This work is both new and familiar, familiar in that it will key into a twofold perception—to experience and concurrently observe oneself experiencing—a kind of existential trickery that I have played with in previous works. It is new in that it’s my first full-scale architectural interpretation.”

Adds Dorothée Kirch, Director of The Icelandic Art Center, “Sigurdardóttir has in recent years achieved substantial acclaim in the domestic and international art scene where her ever-more-elaborate projects have been well received. She holds a unique position among Icelandic artists, particularly in terms of her diverse sculptures and installations that are based on a strong conceptual foundation.”

Eva Heisler, American poet and art critic, writes in the exhibition catalogue, “The raised floor, extending throughout the space and projecting outside the building, appears to slice through the Lavanderia. From the roof, guests look down on the tiled platform as it extends from the building on three sides… rather like seepage of the interior. Sigurdardóttir’s viewing platform is so intricate that it is the view. Traversing the decorative surface enhances awareness of the body’s relationship to space as one struggles to make sense of the building’s altered scale and the distraction of pattern at one’s feet.”

Sigurdardóttir has worked with two curators in realizing the exhibition, Mary Ceruti and Ilaria Bonacossa. Ceruti is Executive Director and Chief Curator at SculptureCenter. Located in Long Island City, New York, SculptureCenter is dedicated to experimental and innovative developments in contemporary sculpture. Ceruti has organized numerous solo and group exhibitions, as well as special projects, and commissions by emerging and established artists. Bonacossa is the Director of Villa Croce, Contemporary Art Museum in Genova since 2012. After ten years as curator at Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Torino, she co-founded Art at Work in 2009: a collective that commissions and develops contemporary art projects through an innovative working platform that operates in both public and private institutions, as well as for-profit and not-for-profit organizations. She has written about art for international institutions and magazines.

Link: Venice: Katrín Sigurdardóttir at The Icelandic Pavilion