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9/6/2010

Jan Merta / Donelle Woolford

Galerie Martin Janda, Wien

Jan Merta

Jan Merta is one of the most important Czech artists of our day. Merta works with classical image motifs. He shows everyday objects, which are transformed with respect to technique and content, and abstracted, their original meaning extracted. Merta’s painting always remains reserved. Through the small gestures, painterly details and often humorous titles, recognizable things are imbued with complex content. Merta returns again and again to individual themes; often numerous variations of the same title ensue. The differences are usually minimal, but significant in content: “I work with variations to get closer to the theme.”

“Merta builds each painting as a completely independent entity and its subject matter, composition, meaning and execution aspire to send a special message, to build a universe of its own. The artist does not strive to create a ‘style’ that will encompass the totality of the world and become a cipher of the universe in a modernistic (or romantic) spirit, rather he works within an originality which, at any one moment, commands a specific approach and effect.” (Marek Pokorný)

Jan Merta, born 1952 in Sumperk, lives and works in Prag and České Lhotice.

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Donelle Woolford: Wite Trash

Galerie Martin Janda is pleased to present an exhibition by New York-based artist Donelle Woolford. This will be her first show at the gallery. Through her work, Donelle Woolford investigates myth and the process by which fictional characters and story lines enter the public imagination and, through their circulation and discourse, become real.

Donelle Woolford’s new paintings revolve around two unrelated cultural phenomena, both having to do with degradation and the color white. The first is the so-called “end of painting” that occurred in Europe and America in the 1960s and 70s. Ad Reinhardt’s Black Paintings aside, this historical moment was predominantly “white” both in terms of the images that were produced by the likes of Robert Rauschenberg, Agnes Martin, Roman Opalka, Jo Baer, and Robert Ryman and in the racial makeup of these artists themselves. The second phenomenon, one both more personal and remote, is the fact that Ms. Woolford grew up in the American South and is thus well accustomed to the cultural habits of rural Caucasian southerners, often pejoratively referred to as “white trash.”

As such, this show marks the very beginning of Ms. Woolford’s investigation into whether there might be a relationship — however speculative or farfetched — between the sparse endgame economy of late-Modernist painting and the desperate socio-economics of working class whites. This latter desperation has recently manifested itself as the so-called “Tea Party” movement in the United States, in which long-simmering race and class resentments have boiled over into virulent public displays of veiled threats, overt racism, and often humorously misspelled protest signs.

Donelle Woolford was born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1977. She has had one-person shows at Wallspace, New York, Galerie Chez Valentin, Paris; Galerie de Expeditie, Amsterdam; and Artissima, Torino. She also has participated in the 8th Sharjah Biennial, United Arab Emirates, Double Agent at the ICA, London, and Paper Exhibition at Artists Space, New York. In June she published her “Plot Structure and Character Development” in La Copia, Lo Falso (Y El Originial), XV Jornadas De Estudio de la Imagen de la Comunidad de Madrid, Spain. She lives in New York City.

Image: Jan Merta

Opening: Thursday, June 10, 2010, 7 p.m.

Galerie Martin Janda
Eschenbachgasse 11, A-1010 Wien
Opening hours: Tue-Fri 1 p.m.-6 p.m., Sat 11 a.m.-3 p.m.
free admission

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