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3/11/2010

Two exhibitions

Xavier Hufkens, Bruxelles

Xavier Hufkens is pleased to present a new exhibition of work by Richard Artschwager. It is the artist’s third solo exhibition at the gallery.

Richard Artschwager is an artist who refuses to be pigeonholed. His work has been variously labelled pop art (because it draws on everyday objects), minimal art (because of its geometric forms and clean lines) and conceptual art (because of its cool and cerebral detachment). Each and every one of these labels fails to capture this maverick artist. Artschwager has been making art for over four decades but was originally trained as a microbiologist. In the 1950s he made furniture, which he came to deconstruct into sculptures. To some extent his sculptures were in tune with the spirit of minimalism. They were followed by the so-called ‘quotation pieces’: two and three-dimensional representations of punctuation marks which, by analogy with their written counterparts, frame ‘space’ and give it a purpose. The ‘quotation pieces’ constituted a physical, playful pendant to the more rigid, language-oriented conceptual art. In addition Artschwager painted architectural subjects in shades of grey on grainy Celotex.

At Xavier Hufkens the artist is showing a series of recent portraits and landscapes. In most of these paintings he eschews his usual grisaille style, opting instead for muted colours and a visual imagery that evokes the work of Cézanne, Vuillard, Bonnard and Morandi. Whereas the landscapes are lively, the portraits are much more subdued. Like Morandi’s work they are suffused by an atmosphere of tranquillity and mild melancholy. At the same time Artschwager distances himself from the aforementioned models through his unusual materials: acrylic, whitewash and pastels on a thick fibrous paper glued onto soundboard. This creates a three-dimensional effect that makes the paintings almost tactile. Or as Artschwager puts it: ‘Sculpture is for the touch, painting is for the eye. I wanted to make a sculpture for the eye and a painting for the touch.’ This practice of playing with the materiality of the artwork is a constant in Artschwager’s oeuvre. He has painted a self-portrait, for example, in which he merges with the material and is seen somewhere between appearing and disappearing.

Artschwager is also showing a sculpture of an exclamation mark in orange rubberized hair. It is a material that the artist often uses and which – like his paintings – has a very tactile quality.

Richard Artschwager (°1923) lives and works in New York. His work has been exhibited in leading art galleries around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Tate Gallery, London; Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich; Serpentine Gallery, London; Fondation Cartier, Paris; Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin; Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Winterthur; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; Kaiser Wilhelm Museum, Krefeld; Mori Art Museum, Tokyo.

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Sterling Ruby
Metal Works

Xavier Hufkens is pleased to announce the forthcoming exhibition by Sterling Ruby, entitled Metal Works. For his second exhibition at the gallery, Sterling Ruby is presenting a new set of sculptures made from welded and cut steel. The artist recently spent a month at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas. While there he found himself immersed in an odd suspension between the minimalist sculptures of Donald Judd, and the social and economic tensions of the Texas-Mexico border.

Sterling Ruby’s new metal structures are fabricated from readily available construction materials, sheet metal, reinforcement bars (rebar), and angle bars. Steel is the most recycled material in the world. Scrap metal is melted down in large furnaces, and reformed to make materials suitable for new construction. The twisted metal of the reinforcement bars often come marked with their point of origin or factory insignia. The rebar used in these sculptures is inscribed with the tag – MEXICO. The artist has also welded his own tag into each of these pieces – SR10.

These pieces speak to the decay of the industrial heart of the American economy, and the power the country still maintains as the largest military-industrial complex in the world. Some of the pieces resemble models for sky-scrapers, while others resemble machine guns or rifles, some pieces suggest fragments of the American flag. The metal works call to mind a number of influences including Russian Constructivism, brutalist architecture, and more obscurely the weapons series by the Arte Povera artist, Pino Pascali.

Throughout his practice, Ruby has confronted the limits of rationality and rebellious impulses of the untrained or liminal individual against the confines of social order. The conspicuous or bad welds incorporated into these works, sometimes referred to as pocked welds, are the kind made by unskilled or amateur welders, and prone to structural failure. As with his previous large metal sculpture Pig Pen, these raw metal works confront the contradictions and burdens within the precarious mechanisms of power.

Sterling Ruby (°1972) lives and works in Los Angeles, California, USA. Recent solo exhibitions include 2TRAPS at The Pace Gallery, New York (2010), Robert Mapplethorpe/Sterling Ruby at Xavier Hufkens, Brussels (2009), The Masturbators at Foxy Production, New York (2009), Supermax 2008 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2008), CHRON at the Drawing Center, New York (2008) and Grid Ripper, Galleria d’arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Bergamo, Italy (2008).

Image: Richard Artschwager, Exclamation Point, 2010, plastic bristles on a mahogany core painted with latex (ed. of 3) 165.1 x 55.9 x 55.9 cm. Courtesy Xavier Hufkens

Opening: Thursday, 4 November 2010, 6 to 9 pm

Xavier Hufkens
Sint-Jorisstraat 6-8 Rue Saint-Georges 1050 Brussels, Belgium

Open Tuesday to Saturday, noon to 6 pm

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