calendario eventi  :: 

X

22/4/2010

Wade Guyton - Jochen Lempert

Museum Ludwig, Koln

Wade Guyton
23 April 2010 – 22 August 2010

the exhibition is curated by Dr. Julia Friedrich

Others have painted with brushes, with light, with sounds, even with metaphors. Wade Guyton paints with an inkjet printer. That sounds cool and ultra-smooth, but it’s actually an unusual and exhausting affair. For such a printer, even an industrial model, is not made for such (ab)use. It is supposed to print paper. If it is fed with canvas, the printhead at times loses its grip; it produces elisions and streaks. The artist must therefore constantly keep watch over the printing process, readjust the canvas and even pull on it to achieve the desired image.

The printer can only process half of the 1.75 meters of the width he has chosen for the Cologne work. For which reason the artist folds the canvas lengthwise. When the one half has finished its run through the printer, he turns the canvas around and prints the other side. The monochrome black planes, stripes and bars, which Guyton has recently begun using very often, are computer-generated. These very elementary geometric forms are printed again and again on the white canvas.

Whereby Guyton follows a strict plan; it is for instance important that the dimensions of each canvas be adapted to the technical details and the space in question. As noted, the cited width corresponds exactly to double the printer’s format capacity, while the length of 7.75 meters is that of the usual commercial bolt of canvas. Although the width of all the artist’s works produced on this printer is the same, the length is oriented to the architecture of the exhibition room, here the high facing wall of the large skylit hall at Museum Ludwig.

Not only the unusual format accords with the space available. Also the central motif, the monochrome bars, blend in. They echo the extremely long and narrow stairway vis-à-vis. Black and white emulate the steps. If you descend the stairs into the room, your own movement seems to set the stripes facing you into motion as well. The staircase is turned into a stage; Guyton’s wall, in an abstract, possibly irritating way, takes up the movement of the visitors. Their approach and gait become somewhat theatrical and—if you think of the black fields as film strips—even cinematic. Grand film entrances on stairways—such as Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard—come to mind. The movements that the canvas suggests are simultaneously those that the artist and canvas went through during its fabrication.

The giant formats that Guyton has shown these past years have led him back to his artistic origins. After all he was, up to 2004, chiefly a sculptor. His elegant sculptures made of steel were preferably in "U" form, massive, at times standing, at times lying. His sculptures were called "drawings in space", which subsequently turned into "printer drawings". It is then not so far-fetched to speak of his extremely long, printed bolts of canvas as "printer sculptures". They redefine the space in which they hang, but they also redefine their medium. They lend something three-dimensional to paintings and graphic prints. And like all sculpture, they also influence and determine the visitor’s movements through the room.

Guyton’s newer paintings, which he developed on the computer, herald the modernist motif par excellence: the monochrome. The classical monochromes by Alexander Rodchenko or Robert Ryman had already served to reduce painting to its essence: color, canvas, frame. We can assume that Guyton’s monochrome bars, even when they appear in larger complexes, have a similar objective to that of Rodchenko and Ryman, namely self-reflective painting. In Cologne their intense black consists of a mixture of all seven colors of the inkjet printer, that is, a non-color that sums up all colors.

Part of the exhibition at Museum Ludwig is the artist’s book Zeichnungen für ein grosses Bild (Publisher: Buchhandlung Walther König, 2010). It contains a collection of original book pages that Guyton extracted from catalogues and printed over with elementary geometric forms. He photographed a stack of the prints against his blue kitchen floor. As the reader turns each page in the book, Guyton takes a drawing from the stack. Like the paintings, here too the reader’s movement is linked to that of the artist during production.

-------

Jochen Lempert
23 April 2010 – 13 June 2010

the exhibition is curated by Dr. Barbara Engelbach

Jochen Lempert’s black and white photographs are dedicated to nature and the animal kingdom. Born 1958 in Moers in Germany, and now living in Hamburg, the artist has worked since the 1990s with the expertise of a trained biologist, the eye of a photographer, and the methods of a scientist. In his early work he collected, archived and systematised his motifs in large groups that prompted the viewer to compare the images and open up a wide array of associations. In his most recent pieces he has increasingly directed his interest to patterns, formations, and structures whose aleatory power reveals itself in swarms of birds, configurations of water and formations of clouds. He investigates how far they are given anthropomorphic interpretations or industrial uses amid the cross-currents of nature and culture, and how they stealthily capture new niches in urban space.

The black and white analogue photographs have been printed on heavy photo paper whose materiality is emphasised by the way the works are hung, always in tune with the gallery space. In Museum Ludwig Jochen Lempert will hang around 60 photographs from the last 15 years in a space measuring around 500 m2.

A number of black birds’ heads shown in profile, all marked by a striking white patch by the eye. On first sight the black and white contrast dominates, and with that their similarity. But on closer inspection the differences become apparent and the birds all come across as individuals. The bird is the great auk, which already became extinct at the end of the 19th century, but today is to be found in various taxidermied versions in the natural history museums of above all Europe, but also the USA. It is the earliest, and still unfinished group of pictures developed by Jochen Lempert: The Skins of Alca impennis. Here at latest it becomes clear how Lempert blends his scientific interests as a biologist with those of an artist. Just as the camera serves as it were as an ornithological instrument for collecting, Lempert documents reports in his catalogues by contemporaries who witnessed the extinction of this species. Just as man influences what is purported to be pristine nature, just as the natural and cultural spheres pervade one another, Lempert observes in various ways. He discovers and photographs cormorants in urban settings in Tokyo, London, Hamburg, Cologne and Rome, he depicts black-headed gulls as they hunt queen ants, or observes the astonishing meetings between man and beast in cultural landscapes.

The likewise long-term investigation entitled "Morphological Studies" also makes it clear that while Lempert’s systematic approach may recall a scientist’s methods, his interest is directed to systems that cannot be pinned down and have often an associative basis. Photographs in rows alternate seemingly by chance between the world of humans and that of animals, allowing similarities in form and structure to be discovered. But apart from formal correspondences, others can be traced that link the realms evoked with camera by their content. We see for instance a skinned hare hanging at the butcher’s beside a view inside a wale skeleton at a natural history museum, or a woman’s naked shoulder framed by the white straps of her top opposite a large white fish that orients itself by means of a long fin ray. The tactile sensations stirred up by the sight of the skin on the woman’s shoulder correlate with the sensory organ depicted in the neighbouring photograph. It is these analogies and associations that are waiting to be found and that make a visit to Jochen Lempert’s exhibition a special experience in seeing and discovery.

For some years now Lempert has isolated his individual photographs on the walls. The alternating large and small prints become "lessons" in seeing, where similarities and correspondences can be identified or elements of motion in the pictures correspond with the viewer’s movements in space. The feeling for material in the photographs is always particularly strong in Lempert’s exhibitions, which he heightens by attaching the works to the wall without frames or glass. Hand-printed on baryta paper, the exposures are slightly wavy along the margins and correlate with the experiments he performs with materials when he makes, for instance, luminograms or photograms, which have captured Lempert’s interest of late: he pours Noctiluca, a luminescent marine protozoan onto photographic paper or makes exposures of reptiles and insects and exhibits the one-off works. Here he draws on his experiences in experimental film in the late 1980s with the group "Schmelzdahin". Working in the tradition of the "material film", the group stashed film away in the earth or in ponds and used the chance organic accretions that accumulated as part of the film image. It is these artistic issues that distinguish Lempert’s exposures of, for example, flocks of white-fronted geese in the sky from ornithological documentation: the flocks in Lempert’s work can be see way up high in a cloudless sky, so that on first sight all that is to be seen is white paper with minute signs of motion. These exposures are not merely to be regarded as imprints of reality but as autonomous images in a modernist tradition.

Lempert’s latest series of photos came about in 2009 during a stay at Villa Massimo in Rome. They show Stromboli, an active volcano, as a black cloud in the shape of an amorphous jellyfish rises up from it and slowly dissipates, until the pale horizon becomes visible against the dark foreground and smoke-blackened sky – a motif that might well prompt viewers to go back beyond Lempert’s most recent work and discover his early oeuvre.

An artist’s book will be published by Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König.


Image: Wade Guyton, from 'Zeichnungen für ein großes Bild', Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König Köln, 2010, © Wade Guyton

Press contact
Anne Buchholtz Tel +49-221-221-23491 Fax+49-221-221-24114 E-Mail buchholtz@museum-ludwig.de

Museum Ludwig
Bischofsgartenstrasse 1, Koln
Opening hours: Tuesday to Sunday 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.
Admission
Adults: € 9, concessions: € 6 (Children under 14, school students, college students, trainees (Azubis), military/alternative service conscripts on production of a valid ID, owners of the "Köln-Pass")
Families: € 18,00
Groups (20 people and over): € 6.50 per person
School classes incl. teacher: free entrance to the collection
€ 3 per pupil/teacher for the special exhibition
All tickets are valid the whole day long and grant admission to the collections and all special exhibitions.

stampa

permanent link