calendario eventi  :: 

X

17/10/2011

The Eternal Detour cycle

Mamco, Geneve

Biens communs I
Recent acquisitions

Paradigms
Adel Abdessemed
Jan Fabre
Alain Séchas
Xavier Veilhan

Monographic show
John M Armleder
Silvia Bächli
Francis Baudevin
Guy de Cointet
Silvie Defraoui
Noël Dolla
Philippe Gronon
Bernard Piffaretti
Pascal Pinaud
Didier Rittener
Patrick Weidmann

&

5 monographic exhibitions

Peter Dreher
Day by Day good Day, Tag um Tag guter Tag, Jour après jour bonne journée

Born in Mannheim in 1932, the German artist Peter Dreher has been producing a pictorial body of work since the early 1970s that involves series of paintings in which each composition treats the same motif or theme. Mamco is pleased to present two series of canvases, including his most widely known, Tag um Tag guter Tag (Day After Day Good Day). Tag makes clear that Dreher’s work is akin to that of a painter of simple popular images, operating in terms of repetition and accumulation, that is, the repetition of motifs, formats and gestures; and the accumulation of views that overwhelm the eye.

Dreher often quotes the observation by the Japanese artist Hiroshige that a beautiful landscape provokes boredom whereas daily objects, in their sheer banality and mediocrity, possess the singular capacity to appear different over and over again. The series of one hundred paintings that the museum is exhibitin—Tag um Tag guter Tag—obey Hiroshige’s remark in several ways. First, there is the choice of motif. In 1972 Dreher painted his first empty glass, posed on a table in front of a white background, a banal object if ever there was. Later, in 1974, he decided to repeat this gesture but according to a precise operating procedure: each picture must measure 25 X 20 cm, the glass must be set up in the same way, he must paint the object on a 1:1 scale, and finally he must realize two series (one at night and the other during the day). The way this work is exhibited never varies, i.e., the small paintings are hung one after the other at eye level, forming a continuous, and dizzying, straight line. Today, nearly 5,000 pieces of Tag um Tag guter Tag have been painted, the display at Mamco giving merely the general outlines of a project that continues to develop. The result blends technical know-how (the craft of the old-time painter of images) and the automatic nature of the highly repetitive, cumulative gesture, the patience of the work and the programmatic character of putting it into practice. It links the possibility that is inherent in painting—its application by the artist and its appreciation by the viewer—with the experience one has of accumulation, even saturation. From all appearances Dreher considers the work of the eye to be infinite and that he is only producing differences from one glass to the next and from one image to its double, a double that is never identical. In his work then there is a curious mix of an attention to the humbleness of an object—and its celebration—that a Giorgio Morandi would not have disavowed; and an execution à la Andy Warhol, which levels gesture in order to empty it of as much expressiveness as possible (to paint like a machine could well have been an artistic program shared by the German artist and his American counterpart). The result is visually unplaceable in time. Without reading the labels, one would indeed find it impossible to say when these small-format paintings were painted in the series—or in time—because they are not pictorially dependent on any gesture that freezes them in a certain chronology or even any circumstance that connects them to history. The second series of small paintings comprises eighty pictures in exactly the same format (15 X 10 cm). The motif here is also a tall clear glass, but in this case a sprig of clover, which gives its name to this group of works (Die Kleeblume), is set in the water-filled container. Dreher paints the decomposition of the plant over time, its putrefaction, and visually introduces, through the linear display, the experience of time, painting in time, and a narrative. These two collections illustrate in a particularly coherent way what lies at the heart of Dreher’s work, namely, the impossible attempt to exhaust a motif. There are, moreover, quite a few motifs (Dreher has painted house interiors, a doll, landscapes and seascapes; he has drawn the portrait of the writer Robert Walser several times). Each painting is the experience of that impossibility, of learning the lesson it has to teach. The artist, furthermore, has in fact devoted a large part of his time to teaching, quite often putting it ahead of his own career, as if learning—that is, repeating and repeating again—was a key part of his development as an artist (he taught, for example, the German painter Anselm Kiefer at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Karlsruhe). And what basically do these paintings transmit if not the idea of painting as a daily practice, of art as a silently heroic practice that draws from this abnegation the possibility of being dizzyingly a teacher?

Peter Dreher was born in 1932 in Mannheim and is currently living in Wittnau.

-----

Romane Holderried Kaesdorf
Bleistift im Kopf

Considered private and personal during the artist’s lifetime, Romane Holderried Kaesdorf’s graphic oeuvre came to light several years ago and is enjoying posthumous fame among the young generation of German artists. The modest home in Biberach where the Kaesdorfs settled, witnessed in the immediate postwar years, the growth of a singular body of work that missed nothing of the fits and starts marking the wider art world. For confirmation of this, one need only look to the osmosis that took place with several figures from the artistic avant-garde, literature and cinema.

Starting in 1960, drawing became a day-to-day discipline for Holderried Kaesdorf. Over two thousand drawings done on unbound sheets gradually came to fill their living space. Holderried Kaesdorf was interested in everything that cropped up before her eye, the everyday stuff making up her daily existence. She learned to paint and draw at the Arts Academy of Stuttgart, and that training soon opened new perspectives for her. With her husband, the painter Julius Kaesdorf, she visited a show in Munich featuring work by the impressionists and discovered “whole continents.” She took in Max Ernst and the surrealists with interest, and was amused by the celluloid extravagances of Laurel & Hardy. She read Beckett, Kafka, and savored the poems and vignettes of the Russian writer Daniil Kharms or Daniel Charms (he used several pen names). A few decades later it would be pop and conceptual art that caught her eye; her most recent drawings show that influence.
Full of human figures and shot through with a sly humor, these works are observational drawings, drawings based on keen observation. Yet under the cover of merely translating the banal, the drawings have the capacity to tip the day-to-day world over into a disturbing strangeness thanks to the repetition of certain gestures, the overlaying of various motifs, and the incongruity of the situations. The lines separating beauty and ugliness, good and evil, the real and the surreal are swept away. The works drawn or painted in the 1960s, for instance, show the influence of James Ensor and George Grosz. From the former she kept the taste for masks, “the flight from reality” and the “modern anxieties.” From the latter she borrowed the distortion of bodies, the ironic distancing of a recurrent unease, and the sense of drama, which casts a shadow of suffering and self-mockery over the work.
Holderried Kaesdorf’s graphic work developed in series. In the 1970s she was drawing passive men. Archetypal figures, they embody the bourgeois, the civil servant, or the model, forced into extravagant, uncustomary poses. Their relationship to objects has something Kafkaesque about it. Faceless, they are saddled with grotesque names, Ludwig Schmauss (Ludwig “feast”), Alfons Moll (Alfons “soft” or “minor key”) and Franz Merk (Franz “note”), included in the titles scribbled at the bottom of the drawings. The titles, moreover, constitute an additional mystery rather than a key to interpretation, with their literalness often only serving as a descriptive caption.
In the 1980s female figures predominate. They are figures without any modeling, hastily drawn to pin down the idea just when it pops up and before it flits out of existence. All of them seem to embody the artist’s double. The fantastical motifs that surface in these drawings lend them their uncanny character and hard edge. Drawing that is forceful, intimate, twisted in knots depicts a world “in which figures knock into each other rather than mix,” where the splitting of the image is at once a mirror and the other, harmony and threat. When the faces are whole, you can read resignation there, the faded or hallucinated dreams of the figures painted by Paula Modersohn-Becker.
In this world, where the background is rarely sketched out, where the white of the blank page acts as a setting, bodies or parts of bodies face off with objects, confront each other, are sized up in terms of their surface, and test the link that connects us with the world of those things that we produce and whose symmetry is modeled on the symmetry of our own bodies. Equipped with accessories and artificial limbs, her figures stand beside accumulations of metonymic objects with which they dance strange ballets. An oar evokes the sea, a journey that is metaphorical, dreamt of… and it is the world that bursts into the enclosed space of the page.

Romane Holderried Kaesdorf was born in 1922 in Biberach, and died there in 2007.

-----

Jugnet + Clairet
A Summary

Anne Marie Jugnet and Alain Clairet have been working together since 1997 and are currently based in Santa Fe (USA). Through their art, the two explore the origin of meaning, that of images, first and foremost. Artisanal and sophisticated at one and the same time, their work has found expression in a range of media and techniques, including sculpture, painting, watercolor, neon, silkscreen and photography. In conjunction with Biens communs 1, Mamco is featuring a fine selection of their output called Un abrégé (A Summary).

Among the singular pieces being shown by Jugnet and Clairet are a number of small white clouds. They are in fact sculptures and are made from Carrara marble, the very same employed by Michelangelo. These sculptures first took shape around photographs that Clairet shot over the New Mexican desert from a Cessna airplane flown by Jugnet. Laid over a support, the wispy shapes may appear light and fluffy, but pick them up and one immediately feel's their weight and density. There is an arresting discrepancy then between the appearance of the artwork and its material reality. That is, what one sees rarely matches reality as such, which probably doesn’t exist. The Baudelairian character of the sculptures (“the marvelous clouds,” as Baudelaire famously celebrates them) shouldn’t overshadow the production process, which is an essential part of their creation, a process that makes it possible to shift from the photo to something with volume, a translation of a two-dimensional image into a heavy, dense material. Indeed, complex operations involving a translation of some sort lie at the heart of the artists’ work. This holds as well for another category of painted clouds; the mushroom kind produced by atomic bombs. They form a series done in 2007 —serial work is a recurrent presence in their artistic output— that consists of a number of elongated paintings, each of which takes as its starting point a photograph (in this case drawn from the Internet) that is reworked with a computer design program so that it can be enlarged infinitely without loss of definition. After a number of manipulations, Clairet and Jugnet obtain a “realist” depiction of their starting point, one that proves quite process-oriented, but without the work of the human hand being consigned merely to the final result. Indeed, this fascination with process and procedure, which also entails a reappropriation of technology, obliterates the body (as Jean-Louis Schefer put it, “The painter doesn’t bring his body here”). Other examples of clouds include those done in watercolor by the artists in 2007. These small-format works, colored red, also took shape around photographs, pictures of clouds that figure in works of Chinese art and which the artists shot in the Shanghai Museum. The logic of transference eventually led to this painted result. Such is the case too, of the artists’ small red suns from 2006. For the origin of these works we need to look in a fresco by Fra Angelico that is on display in San Marco in Florence. Sampling and transposition play an important role in Jugnet and Clairet’s art. The two artists however, do lay down precise rules for groups of pieces. If one considers only the atmospheric dimensions of their work, the skies, which make up several series (Villa Arson, 1997; Cordoba, 2002), were produced according to a given procedural framework. First, the sky had to be photographed in a certain urban context. Next neither airplane, cloud, nor bird can appear in the shot. The resulting image is akin to a blue monochrome, although in this case we have an impossible monochrome since the photographed sky can never exactly achieve an azure color (the luminosity of the atmosphere, the curvature of the sky and so on rule that out). In this, one can glimpse one of the dimensions of the couples’ art, i.e., the idea of occupying a zone of visual experience that leads to producing images in which their own failure is contained. What counts is to work in a paradoxical manner, where things verge on the possible. As Jugnet and Clairet see it, “It’s not by questioning form that we intend to create new forms, but rather by inventing new conditions for them to emerge. This gives rise to other figures and possibilities. Our thinking about art lies in that questioning of the image, at the limit of its exhaustion.”

Anne Marie Jugnet was born in 1958 in La Clayette, Alain Clairet was born in 1950 in Saint-Maur-des-Fossés; they live and work in Santa Fe (USA).

-----

Natacha Lesueur
I am born etc.

Since the early 1990s, Natacha Lesueur has been building on an approach to photography in which the body and food are recurrent elements. This is not, however, reason enough to place her work in the camp of body art or eat art. Rather, the images produced, notably the most recent—visually they make quite a noise—amount to an exploration of multiple aspects of the decorated body, which is itself carefully arranged in a setting. It is an arty, enhanced body, both radiant and disturbing.

Apart from three photographs shot in the first decade of this century, Lesueur has chosen to focus on her most recent images (those dating from 2010 and 2011) in the current show. The richest series is her most recent, which she worked on for two years, and concerns Carmen Miranda, a Hollywood star of the 1940s and ’50s. The Portuguese-born Miranda had grown up in Brazil and was nicknamed the “Brazilian Bombshell” in her heyday on screen, when she embodied exoticism from the Western point of view—just as in Hollywood she represented the success of a woman from the southern hemisphere in a country up north. She made a name for herself in entertainment for mass audiences by playing the samba dancer, very often as pure caricature, and regularly sporting a headdress fitted out with a full tray of fruit (the tray of delicacies proffered by native women in Bahia), whilst dressed in flashy outfits inspired by traditional Brazilian costumes. Lesueur has taken this figure as the starting point for an exploration of the image of women. The model who plays Carmen Miranda in Lesueur’s series was in fact pregnant when the photos were being shot, and her physical transformation, as the artist puts it, “is part of the project’s development, with the photography capturing her transitional states.” In this series of images then, viewers are also looking at the most complete expression of femininity and its clichés, from maternity and “fatal” beauty, to budding beauty and the smile that is often perfunctory, even obligatory. And yet, something like a flaw disturbs this extravagant exoticism. The fruit in the compositions atop the model’s head is rotting, the flowers of these elaborate multilayered constructions are wilting, and the decoration seen in the background behind the image is very often rudimentary. These are all signs of entropy at work. Indeed, Lesueur’s world is not picture perfect. We often catch a glimpse of both a suppressed violence and, as is the case in this series, a strange beauty that is both appealing and repulsive. For the first time the artist is showing two video pieces and a film, all three devoted yet again to Carmen Miranda. The model playing the former star is filmed as if she were a mechanical doll that runs without making a sound. A plaster bust completes these iterations of the character. Constituting a survey of the techniques that make it possible to produce a portrait, these iterations likewise scramble different ages and references (we readily skip from Hollywood to “classical” sculpture). Miranda represented to an extreme degree the manufactured woman exploited by the logic of show business and spectacle. Her tragic early death (heavy drinking destroyed her health) is included in these depictions somehow, for collapse looms behind the constructed pose. I am born etc. features other recent images as well. Photos of elderly women, for example, picture them bursting out laughing, their teeth coated in varnish. The smiles, both unnerving and indicating great health, waver between spontaneity and a state of tension. Lesueur has produced these images while displaying once again an especially sharp sense of composition and setting. The colors of the models and the backgrounds, like the poses struck by the figures, combine to lend the pieces a classical decorative craftsmanship that exists side by side with the unsettling eeriness of the colored mouths. Finally, the artist fills out the current selection with a number of older photos. Men, relatively rare in Lesueur’s work, are featured, including one who is sleeping and another who is naked but wearing a helmet. The face of the former displays visible marks—are these dream drawings inscribed directly on the skin (dermography), or abstract traces of his innermost turmoil? The other man is facing the viewer and the phrase written on his helmet makes the image—and the photographed body—something that can be both seen and read. It is another way of treating the body as the origin and ultimate horizon of plasticity.

Natacha Lesueur was born in 1971 in Cannes; she lives and works in Paris.

-----

Moo Chew Wong
Uncertified Copy

If the dreary figure of the art copyist—gray overalls, greasy palette, stained easel, standing before a masterpiece in a museum of old masters—is familiar to us, it is an altogether different impression with the dynamic silhouette of a painter bent over a canvas laid directly on the floor and cheerfully tracing out in colored pigment the shapes of a contemporary work of art in front of him. Be it a grid of fluorescent tubes by Dan Flavin, a wrecked Alfa Romeo by Bertrand Lavier, or a self-portrait by Martin Kippenberger, the copies done over the years in Mamco by Moo-Chew Wong are anything but exact with respect to their models.

Just as newspaper columns speak as much about the columnists behind them as the events they relate, Wong’s paintings are as much about the vitality of pictorial expressivity as they are about the artworks to which they devote their cannibalistic exercise in admiration. The result is a paradoxical, subjective and erratic archive of exhibitions held at Mamco, a funhouse mirror that distorts the institution’s choices and a fanatical, inappropriate memory of its fleeting paradigms.

Is Moo-Chew Wong an anachronism? He is advanced in years and practices painting —oil painting— of figurative pictures painted from nature, stark colors in which black is abundant, worked in impasto, brushes and painter’s knives, quickly done, sometimes almost indecipherable, always incomplete, in manic periods of work, a race against time, the fading light or the intensity of capturing the image, all of that with the elegance of the sage of yore suddenly seized by a frenzy, jubilant, who is, it would appear, redoing the grand gestures of the painter, as if it were the first time, as if he had never had any other studio or venue than the moment.
We owe it to Master Wong to have looked at the contemporary through the mistakenly obsolete lenses of expressionist modernity and the sense of an urgency for which his performances provide an oddly up-to-date form.

Moo Chew Wong was born in Malaysia in 1942; he lives and works in Paris.

The English translations has been provided with the support of the J.P. Morgan Private Bank.

Image: Xavier Veilhan, La Forêt, 1998. Coll. Mamco. Photo: Ilmari Kalkkinen – Mamco, Genève © 2011, ProLitteris, Zürich

Press contact:
Sophie Eigenmann T.+41 22 320 61 22 s.eigenmann@mamco.ch

Opening Tuesday 18th October 2011, 6. p.m.

Musée d’art moderne et contemporain MAMCO
10, rue des Vieux-Grenadiers CH-1205 Genève
Hours:
Tue - Fri 12am - 6pm
first Wed of the month until 9pm
Sat and Sun 11am-6pm
Closed december 24, 25, 31 2011 and 1st january 2012.
Admission:
Full CHF 8.–
Reduced CHF 6.–
Groups CHF 4.–

stampa

permanent link