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1/9/2010

Barbara Kruger - Astrid Klein - Ed Ruscha

Spruth Magers, Berlin

Barbara Kruger

Sprüth Magers Berlin is delighted to present the first solo exhibition by American artist Barbara Kruger in Berlin. The exhibition features a new multi channel video installation, entitled The Globe Shrinks (2010) that continues the artist’s engagement with the kindness and brutality of the everyday, the duet of images and text and the resonance of direct address.

Born in Newark, New Jersey in 1945, Barbara Kruger began her career as an editorial designer, followed by a picture editor at Condé Nast Publications. She started making art in the early 1970s and gradually developed her unmistakable and unique formal language using a powerful combination of image and text.

Since the mid 1990s, Barbara Kruger has diversified her practice and embraced a series of aesthetic expansions which includes working with film and audio installations. This progression into large-scale immersive installations is fuelled by the artist’s longstanding interest in architecture and desire to address the viewer directly within whole environments.

Barbara Kruger lives and works in New York and Los Angeles. She was awarded The Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the 51st Venice Biennale in 2005 and currently teaches at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Solo shows include the Institute of Contemporary Art, London (1983); the Kunsthalle Basel (1984); the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal (1985); the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf (1986); the Serpentine Gallery, London (1994); the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (1999) and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2000). Group shows include the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (1987); the Centre Pompidou, Paris (1988); the Tate Liverpool (2002); the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2004); the Palazzo Grassi, Venice (2006) and the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2007).

Sprüth Magers Berlin will also be concurrently presenting exhibitions by Astrid Klein and Ed Ruscha.

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Astrid Klein

Monika Sprüth and Philomene Magers are delighted to present the first exhibition by Astrid Klein in their Berlin gallery. The title of the exhibition Broken Heart, Works 1980-1995 references a body of work from the year 1980. A selection of works from this series, two sculptures (1990/1995) and works from the series weiβe Bilder (white paintings), achieved between 1988 and 1993, will be exhibited.

The painter and sculptor Astrid Klein has been working at integrating text into her paintings for over three decades. In 1972, before she had even started her degree in Cologne (1973-77), she began to write several texts which she later printed onto hand-made paper. The topics of her own texts, as well as her later use of other textual sources, bear witness to her thoughts on literary, aesthetic, philosophical and scientific writings. In a fragmented and concealed way these various sources are incorporated into her Schriftbilder (text paintings) which make up the large majority of the exhibited works in Berlin.

The large format works of the 1980 series Broken Heart use excerpts of text from Arno Schmidt’s seminal work Zettels Traum (1970) in relation to the representation of women in cinema and photonovels from the 60s and 70s. The latter were affected by a voyeuristic, masculine perspective along with this the fetishisation of the female form. In the collages, Astrid Klein links textual and pictorial material on a visual level that not necessarily share the same semantic level. This creates a context, in which new meanings are revealed.

The sculptures BROKEN HEART I and BROKEN HEART II (1990/5) contain mirrors that have either been shot at or have been smashed with a hammer. The cracks mean that the reflections of the surroundings can only be viewed as fragmentary or deformed.

With the weiβe Bilder (1989-1993), which can be seen as the counterpart to the series schwarze Bilder (black paintings) of the 70s, Astrid Klein approaches the limits of visibility. To make the invisible visible and to show what can’t be shown is hinted at in the paradoxical phrase Erinnerungen eines Gedächtnislosen (memoirs of a person who does not remember) featured in one if the works on display. The memories fade in the gradual repetitions of two lines of text, as this is how the almost unrecognisable text line at the bottom left hand corner can be interpreted – nicht bis ins Herz getrieben (they do not penetrate the heart).

Astrid Klein’s paintings, collages, works of photography and installations created since 1978 question, deconstruct and renew the relationship between image and text. Since the beginning of the 90s, she continued these intense discussions also in her large format neon sculptures and light installations. The form and the typeface of the text play as important a role in the works as the content. The overlay, blurring and accentuation can be read as the archeological layers of our thinking and our perception, of memory and oblivion, of what we suppress and what is subconscious.

Astrid Klein lives and works in Cologne, she has been awarded numerous prizes for her works, amongst others the Käthe-Kollwitz-Prize of the Academy of Arts, Berlin (1997) and the KUNSTKÖLN-PRIZE in 2001 (now the Cologne Fine Art & Antiques-Prize). Since 1993 the artist has held a professorship at the Academy of Visual Arts in Leipzig.

Astrid Klein’s works have been displayed in prominent solo exhibitions. These include L’air de Berlin 2000 Rauminstallation at the Hamburger Bahnhof, Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin (2002); Auswege II at the Neue Museum, Staatliches Museum für Kunst und Design, Nürnberg (2001). The artist’s photographic works were exhibited in 1995 at the Fotomuseum Winterthur similarly in 1989 in the exhibition Astrid Klein. Photoarbeiten 1984-1989 in the Kestnergesellschaft, Hannover; the Institute for Contemorary Art, London; the Wiener Sezession, Vienna and the Forum Stadtpark, Graz. Important group exhibitions include Zur Vorstellung des Terrors. Die RAF-Ausstellung, at the KW- Kunst-Werke, Berlin (2005); Deutschlandbilder, at the Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin (1997); Photographie des 20. Jahrhunderts, at the Museum Ludwig, Köln (1996); Photography in contemporary German art 1960 to the present, at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (1992). Noteworthy is Astrid Klein’s participation in the Documenta 8 (1987) and the 42nd Biennale in Venice (1986).

Sprüth Magers Berlin will also be concurrently presenting exhibitions by Barbara Kruger and Ed Ruscha.

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Ed Ruscha

Monika Sprüth and Philomene Magers are pleased to present an exhibition of work by Ed Ruscha in Berlin, featuring early photographs, drawings as well as two filmic works.

Since the early 1960s, Ed Ruscha has created an extensive painterly, graphical, and photographic oeuvre. Ruscha first considered working as a graphic artist but soon developed a deep passion for painting and photography. Inspired by the American photography of the 1940s and 1950s, Ruscha developed an independent conceptual approach which is manifested in the sixteen photo-books, created between 1963 and 1978, in which he offered a fresh interpretation of the idea of the artist's book. These small, unpretentious books, which Ruscha always issued in a limited edition, anticipated with their titles in a laconic manner the entire contents of the books, for example Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1963); Various Small Fires and Milk (1964); Some Los Angeles Apartments (1965); Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1966) as well as Thirtyfour Parking Lots in Los Angeles (1967) or Nine Swimmingpools and a Broken Glass (1968). They show how Ruscha broke away from the traditions of the genre and simultaneously distanced himself from the subjectivist, analytical photo-books of such author-photographers as Robert Frank and Walker Evans. Coming to the fore here, instead of pictorial sequences ordered according to formal and contentual critiera, was a serial arrangement in which the disregard of classical conventions of photography, namely the requirements of perspective and composition, became a characteristic of his photographic aesthetic. Ruscha's pictures map out the redundant appearance of the West Coast civilization of the USA through the monotony and repetitiveness of the series.

Although Ed Ruscha considers himself to be a painter and draftsman rather than a photographer, in 1999 he issued thirty motifs from his artist book Thirtyfour Parking Lots (1967/1999). His procedure of selection for the re-edited photographs was intuitive. He described it in this way: ‘Originally, I thought that the pictures were a means to an end, a vehicle to make a book. And then along the way there was some gear shifting. Over the years, I began to appreciate print quality and see my photographs as not necessarily reproductions for a book, but as having their own life as silver gelatin prints.‘(*) The exhibition presents works which are characteristic of Ruscha's photographic oeuvre, and which arose in the context of the artist-books but are not necessarily a part of them. For example, the black silhouette of the palm tree, which originally adorned the main motif of the artist-book entitled A Few Palm Trees (1971), was later featured as an autonomous photograph in the series Palm Trees (1971/2003). Furthermore, Ruscha combined a selection of ‘outtakes‘ into the portfolio Real Estate Opportunities (1970/2003), which brings together photographs of unattractive building sites with subtle irony.

Equally characteristic for Ruscha's aesthetic are the pictures of unfrequented sections of streets in the Roof Top Views (1961/2003), which suggest an arbitrary selection of images. Works such as the completely deserted views of the stereotypical architecture of Apartment Houses (1965/2003) convey, through both a formal and technical nonchalance as well as through their distanced perspective, a sharp break with the viewing habits of the time.
The apartment buildings, which are typical of Los Angeles and are photographed from an extremely slanted angle, are also reminiscent of the experimental perspective of the Russian Formalists. With these photographs, Ruscha clarified his point of view with regard to photography: ‘Drawings would never express the idea - I like facts, facts, facts are in these books. The closest representation to an apartment house in Some Los Angeles Apartments is a photograph, nothing else, not a drawing, because that becomes somebody else’s vision of what it is, and this is the camera’s eye, the closest delineation of that subject.’(**) But he contradicted this particular statement by creating in the same year several graphite drawings on the basis of these photographs, precisely because a personal interpretation of this theme was interesting for him. Here the studies, reduced to their semiotic character and based on concrete geographical models, such as Study for Doheny Drive Apartment Building (1965) and Study for St. Tropez Apartment Building (1965), make it clear how much Ruscha uses both media in his oeuvre, and the manner in which they exercise a mutual influence on each other.

The interpenetration of the various genres becomes especially apparent in his only film works Premium (1971) and Miracle (1975). Proceeding from a short story by Mason Willians entitled How to Derive the Maximum Enjoyment from Crackers (1964), Ruscha arranged in Premium a scenario which he first projected in his photo-book Crackers from 1969 and subsequently transformed into a film. Miracle contains the essence of the artist's same-named painting, inasmuch as the story is told of a strange day in the life of an auto mechanic.

Ed Ruscha was born in 1937 in Omaha, Nebraska; he lives and works in Los Angeles. In 2005 Ruscha represented the United States of America at the 51st Venice Biennale; in September 2006, Ruscha was awarded the cultural prize of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Photographie (DGPh, ‘German Society for Photography’).

Important solo exhibitions have included Cotton Puffs, Q-tips®, Smoke and Mirrors: The Drawings of Ed Ruscha at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles in 2004, which was subsequently exhibited at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Furthermore, during the same year the Whitney Museum initiated the exhibition Ed Ruscha and Photography. Likewise in 2004, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney presented an exhibition with a selection of Ruscha's photographs as well as paintings, drawings, and artist-books, which was subseqently shown at the Museo Nazionale delle Arti del XXI Secolo in Rome, as well as at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh. A further exhibition of Ruscha's photographs entitled Ed Ruscha and Photography was mounted in 2006 by the Jeu de Paume in Paris, the Kunsthaus Zürich and the Museum Ludwig in Cologne. In 2009 the Hayward Gallery in London organized what is certainly the most comprehensive retrospective of Ruscha's paintings up to now with the exhibition Fifty Years of Painting, which after the Haus der Kunst in Munich may currently be seen until the beginning of September at its final station, the Moderna Museet in Stockholm.

Sprüth Magers Berlin will also be concurrently presenting exhibitions by Barbara Kruger and Astrid Klein.

*Ed Ruscha in an interview with Silvia Wolf, Ed Ruscha and Photography, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Göttingen, 2004.
**Ed Ruscha in an interview with A. D. Coleman, My Books End Up in the Trash, The New York Times, August 27, 1972, p 12.

For further information and press inquiries please contact Jan Salewski
js@spruethmagers.com

Image: Barbara Kruger

Opening 02 September, 6 - 9 PM

Spruth Magers Berlin
Oranienburger Strasse 18, 10178 Berlin
Opening Hours Tuesday - Saturday 11 am - 6 pm
free admission

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