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13/1/2011

Alexandre Singh / Andreas Schulze

Spruth Magers, Berlin

Alexandre Singh
The Alkahest

Sprueth Magers is pleased to present a solo exhibition of the New York based artist Alexandre Singh. Singh’s work derives at once from traditions in literature, performance, photo-conceptualism and object-based installation art. Often starting with elaborate, publicly presented lectures that blend historical fact with narrative fiction, Singh’s practice resists categorization.

His Assembly Instruction works, two of which are presented in the exhibition, visualize the artist’s fantastically woven stories in the form of wall-mounted, photocopied collages visually connected by dotted lines penciled directly onto gallery walls. Presented in both live form as public lectures using overhead projectors and transparencies, Singh’s narratives delve into diverse disciplines such as science, pseudo-science, industry, magic, business and art history; each element is linked to another producing unexpected congruencies and points of intersection. The work Assembly Instructions (IKEA) improbably takes as its starting point the development of the internationally successful home-goods retailer, and from its floor plan infers what amounts to a history of human consciousness.

Equally absurd are Singh’s Assembly Instructions (Concerning the Apparent Asymmetry of Time: Painting) in which he reimagines modern art, as it would have been today if the second law of dynamics had been the reverse of what it is; rather than all things tending toward entropy, all would tend toward order. The physical manifestation of the narrative, like his Assembly Instruction works, takes the form of a flow chart or as a visual system rendered directly on the wall. A third element in the exhibition is a collage commissioned for Art Review’s latest 'Power 100' issue. Its elements similarly combine disparate elements. In this case the look of 19th century print media grounds Singh’s very contemporary commentary on the notion of the elite in the art system. The collage was printed on the cover of the very publication that proposes to name and construct a hierarchy.

The exhibition will be initiated with Alexandre Singh’s The Alkahest, which will be performed on 15 January 2011 at 8 pm. The work interweaves the philosophically challenging notion of an alchemical substance, which can dissolve all others and of course can never be contained, with numerous other elements including flying saucers, the 2nd World War, Yves Klein, shamans, the island of Manhattan and Molière.

The exhibition is organized in cooperation with New York based curator Christopher Eamon.

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Andreas Schulze

Monika Sprüth and Philomene Magers are pleased to present an exhibition by Andreas Schulze in Berlin

Similarly as in other works, Andreas Schulze is concerned here with an approach to reality, with the possibilities of its representation and the emphasizing of the artificiality of this depiction. Harald Falckenberg offers the following comments upon the significance of Andreas Schulze as an artist of our era:

''The art of Andreas Schulze, aged fifty-four, was and is uncontemporary in the best sense of the word. He has never paid attention to the trends in the operating system of art. Schulze paints things, strangely large-formated, color-intensive motifs with ornaments, globes, square and rectangular forms, mostly with a perspectival orientation. And he designs spaces, living rooms with furniture, lamps, carpets and dinnerware. These are views into an old-fashioned and naive world of German gemütlichkeit, a design quite removed from modernist concepts.

Andreas Schulze was of no concern either to the theory-oriented art of the nineteen-seventies, with its focus on social relevance, or to the politically oriented Context Art of the nineteen-nineties. His time as the inventor of new pictorial worlds seemed to have come during the nineteen-eighties when, under the slogan ‘hunger for pictures’, there was a renaissance of painting. It was a matter of the Mülheimer Freiheit, of the Jungen Wilden and, on an international level, of the art of the Transavanguardia. Andreas Schulze collaborated with the artists of the Mülheimer Freiheit and participated in their exhibitions. But artistically he remained an outsider, and personally a maverick. The Neo-Expressionist attitude of those years, with its inclination towards hedonism and self-dramatization, was not for him. All the way to today, he has remained true to ‘things’, to his convictions, also with regard to the Neo-Romantic tendencies of the painting of the last ten years. People have no place in his oeuvre.

Andreas Schulze stands in high esteem as an artist's artist among colleagues from George Condo, Fischli & Weiss, Thomas Grünfeld and Gary Hume to Gert and Uwe Tobias, as well as with exhibition organizers such as Lynne Cooke, Zdenek Felix, Robert Fleck, Udo Kittelmann, Kasper König and Ralph Rugoff. His spaces recall the Merzbau, the refuge which the artist Kurt Schwitters described as the cathedral of his erotic misery. The Merzbau has become a model for young contemporary art from Jonathan Meese to Gregor Schneider. It is a matter of forms for the conduct of life which do not oppose society but instead create alternatives which are ultimately models of escapism.

The exhibition in Hamburg was entitled INTERIEUR. This stands for the inner viewpoint of an artist who creates art in order to provide himself with both furnishings and orientation, and it designates the peculiar, ludicrous objects of his surroundings. Andreas Schulze has created for himself his own scurrilous world, an artistic house for his personal life.

With its references, so typical for postmodernism, to such artists of the avant-garde as Donald Judd, Richard Long, Cy Twombly and Andy Warhol, his art has for a long time been considered to be painting in the traditional sense. But this searching after clues, particularly when it is conducted with seriousness, does not lead any further. Andreas Schulze deconstructs interconnections with the intention - expressed sometimes in playful merriness, sometimes with ill nature - of winding back to normality the exalted significance of his renowned predecessors. Avant-gardist art, according to Andreas Schulze in an interview, oscillates between the extremes of refined intellectuality and coarse banality. He himself is instead concerned with ‘bourgeois averageness’, with Meissner porcelain instead of the Brillo box or the Campbell's can. It is time to reconsider and to comprehend Andreas Schulze as a conceptional painter engaged in the design of a dadaistically marked program for living. From his model Kurt Schwitters, born like he himself in Hannover, comes this observation: 'I evaluate sense with regard to nonsense. I prefer nonsense, but that is an entirely personal matter‘. This formulation also stands for the attitude of Andreas Schulze. [...]'' (Harald Falckenberg, 2010)

Andreas Schulze was born in 1955 in Hannover, he studied at the Gesamthochschule Kassel and at the Staatliche Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where he is active as a professor for painting. In 1983 Monika Sprüth opened her gallery with a solo exhibition by Andreas Schulze. Important group exhibitions could be seen at the MoMA in New York (1984), at the Tate in London (1987), at the Kunstforeningen in Copenhagen, and at the Triennale in Venice (1997). Works of the artist are to be found in numerous private and institutional collections.

A publication on Andreas Schulze’s work will appear in September 2010 with essays by Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen, Margit Brehm, Susanne Rennert / Michael Trier and Harald Falckenberg, an artist's conversation with Heinz-Norbert Jocks, along with statements about the artist by such artists as George Condo, Fischli & Weiss, Thomas Grünfeld, Gary Hume as well as by Lynne Cooke, Zdenek Felix, Robert Fleck, Udo Kittelmann, Kasper König and Ralph Rugoff.

Image: Alexandre Singh, Assembly Instructions (The Power of 100), 2010. Framed inkjet ultrachrome archival print 70 x 50 cm

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

Performance on 15 January 2011 at 8 pm

Opening reception: 14.01.2011, 6 - 9 pm

Sprüth Magers Berlin
Oranienburger Straße 18 D-10178 Berlin
Hours:
Tuesday – Saturday 11am – 6pm and by appointment

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