calendario eventi  :: 

X

13/9/2011

Joe Scanlan

Galerie Martin Janda, Wien

Galerie Martin Janda is showing Joe Scanlan’s fourth solo exhibition Möbel from 14th September to 29th October 2011.

“The show is based on a very simple idea, that of ‘furniture’. But there won't really be any recognizable furniture objects in the show. Rather, it is a show about the definition of furniture not being a literal object but more of a political and philosophical concept. Furniture does not mean ‘chair’ so much as it means a state of mind about being structural, supportive, in the background, important but almost anonymous. The works in the show will break into two groups: clotheslines and stretchers. The clotheslines are like drawings in space, geometric arrangements with colored shapes hanging from them. The stretchers in Möbel for Knoebel are straightforward painting stretchers – rectangles of various sizes with cross-bracing and beveled edges for stretching canvas – except that they are made out of very fine wood and are crafted to such a degree as to be objects in themselves. Further, they have feet and legs, so that they sit on the wall like ‘furniture’ rather than like paintings. I really like the idea of paintings as furniture, the idea of a painting being in a room just like a chair, it's on the wall but it has a wooden support and a fabric cover. Only I've separated them to make each one a thing of its own. Each part reveals its full character by being separated from the other. I like that the English word mobile and the German Möbel come from the Latin mobilis, or movable. If you make paintings as furniture, it makes a very direct historical reference to the development of images as portable objects, i.e. stretched canvases rather than icons or frescos. So, in the history of painting, this show will make oblique reference to that moment in art history when mobile, Möbel and mobilis were all definitions of not only what a painting was, but what it could do. This still is how we understand paintings today. That's why the show is titled Möbel, to point to this many-layered aspect of an object that is made, looked at, moved, and used.” (Joe Scanlan, August 2011)

Joe Scanlan, born 1961 in Circleville, lives in Brooklyn (USA). Scanlan thematizes – often playfully – the achievements and faults of the modern age, juxtaposes industrial production with traditional trades, and draws from the fund of economic trading to more accurately define his artistic strategies. Since 2009, Joe Scanlan is Director and Professor of Visual Arts at the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University. From 2001 to 2009, he was Professor of Sculpture at Yale University School of Art. For further information on the artist, see www.thingsthatfall.com

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.

stampa

permanent link