calendario eventi  :: 

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3/11/2011

Two exhibitions

David Zwirner, New York

David Zwirner is pleased to present an exhibition of new works by Michaël Borremans, The Devil’s Dress, on display at the gallery’s 525 West 19th Street space.

Borremans’ drawings, paintings, and films present an evocative combination of solemn-looking characters, unusual close-ups, and unsettling still lifes. There is a theatrical dimension to his works, which are at once highly staged and ambiguous, just as his complex and open-ended scenes lend themselves to conflicting moods—at once nostalgic, darkly comical, disturbing, and grotesque. His paintings display a concentrated dialogue with previous art historical epochs, yet their unconventional compositions and curious narratives defy expectations and lend them an indefinable yet universal character.

This exhibition, the artist’s fourth solo show at the gallery, brings together paintings and a three-part work on paper that each seems like a variant of a shared theme. Lone figures in pensive or semiconscious states are depicted squarely in the center of the compositions; while their faces are mostly obscured, a psychologically-charged mood prevails. Some are positioned within barren spaces reminiscent of an artist’s studio with planks or canvases arranged against walls, while others are portrayed luminously against dark, monochrome backgrounds. Titles provide simple but uncertain descriptions, which offer little help for unlocking the narratives.

In The Knives, Borremans depicts a woman with her head bent downwards. Several tears in her tightly-closed jacket are visible and may refer to a preceding act of cutting or stabbing, as hinted at by the title. Yet the gap between what is suggested and the visual information that is made available is amplified by the elusiveness of the woman’s face, with her hidden gaze standing in for illegibility—a characteristic which recurs throughout Borremans’ work. The bright light which illuminates her from an invisible source is stylistically reminiscent of Old Master paintings and here intensifies the uncanniness of the scene and the unembellished, austere mood.

Borremans often pays detailed attention to clothes and textiles, as evidenced throughout the exhibition. Fabric folds sometimes appear like visual representations of convoluted mental states and the clothes, themselves, seem to transform their wearers into sculptural forms. In The Devil’s Dress, a male figure lies limp on a hard floor, nude except for a stiff red “dress” wrapped around him like a coffin; the title of another work, The Wooden Skirt, denotes the material of a nude-colored short skirt worn by a child, who seems spellbound and immobile.

As with Borremans’ work in general, such paintings emphasize the tension between representation and empirical reality and point, by extension, to the impossibility of transparent, unmediated perception. As if a comment on the longstanding debate about art’s approximation to life, which has been given new significance in the past century with the implementation of photo-based imagery in the mass media, his works refuse to adopt a hierarchy between the real and the imaginary. Over the past decade, Borremans’ work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at a number of prominent institutions, most recently in 2011 with the comprehensive solo show Eating the Beard, which was first on view at Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart and traveled to Műcsarnok Kunsthalle, Budapest, and Kunsthalle Helsinki. In 2010, he had a solo exhibition at the Kunstnernes Hus in Oslo as well as commissioned work on view at the Royal Palace in Brussels. Other solo exhibitions include kestnergesellschaft, Hannover (2009); de Appel Arts Centre, Amsterdam (2007); La maison rouge, Paris (2006); Kunsthalle Bremerhaven, Germany; and the Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel (both 2004). In 2005, he had a one-person exhibition of paintings and drawings at the Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst (S.M.A.K.), Ghent. The paintings then traveled to Parasol unit foundation for contemporary art, London, and The Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin, while the drawings traveled to the Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio.

Work by the artist is held in numerous public collections internationally, including The Art Institute of Chicago; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia; The Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst (S.M.A.K.), Ghent; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota. He lives and works in Ghent.

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Neo Rauch
Heilstätten

David Zwirner is pleased to present an exhibition of new works by Neo Rauch, on display at the gallery’s 533 West 19th Street space.

The exhibition, the artist’s fifth solo show at the gallery, consists of small and large format paintings—several larger-than-life—as well as a bronze sculpture, representing one of the first instances Rauch has worked in three-dimensional form.

Born in 1960 in Leipzig, then East Germany, Rauch is part of a generation of artists who came of age in a war-torn, divided country. While his older East German peers, including Georg Baselitz, Anselm Kiefer, Sigmar Polke, and Gerhard Richter, emigrated to the West during the Cold War, Rauch spent his youth in the Eastern Bloc, and received his arts education at the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst in Leipzig. The impermeable border within Germany famously tempered the advance of Western avant-garde movements in the East, where figurative painting maintained its predominance. Not until the end of the 1990s did a shift become apparent, and Rauch, then in his late twenties, came to spearhead a break with the existing dogma.

Rauch’s paintings are characterized by a unique combination of realism and surrealist abstraction. In many of his compositions, human figures engaged in manual labor or indeterminable tasks work against backdrops of mundane architecture, industrial settings, or bizarre and often barren landscapes. These figures, though squarely centered in his paintings, often have the appearance of being part of still lifes devoid of a human presence or collaged elements belonging to different time zones. Scale is frequently arbitrary and non-perspectival, which adds to an overall dream-like atmosphere; the spatial relationships construct their own imaginary realm.

In the large-scale painting Aprilnacht (April Night), a man and a woman each hold and inspect an owl or other big bird (in the case of the man, just its head). A fire is lit up between them and its smoke leads up to a cluster of branches suspended in the sky without visible support, as if spelling out a secret message. A pair of gloves in the bottom left corner likewise hovers without support. Holding a painter’s brush, they represent a covert indication of the artist’s presence or, more broadly, of the creative process as such.

Rauch’s bronze sculpture, Falknerin, depicts a life-size model of the female character with the bird on her outstretched arm. As if a personification of the mythological war goddess Athena, who is typically portrayed with an owl, the woman’s aggressive or perhaps supernatural qualities are indicated by several disembodied heads attached to her front. Although three-dimensional, a similar fantastical quality shrouds the sculpture as the woman in the painting. As Daniel Birnbaum, Director of the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, notes of the artist’s oeuvre in general: “Rauch has constructed a signature yet inscrutable cosmos; a weirdly concrete dream of production, athletic strength, and utopian modernity dreamed in a time and a place that no longer exists and yet prevails mysteriously.”

Rauch’s work is currently on view alongside work by his artist-wife Rosa Loy in a two-person exhibition at the Essl Museum in Klosterneuburg, Austria (through November 16, 2011). His work has been the subject of several solo exhibitions at prominent institutions internationally, most recently in 2011 at the Museum Frieder Burda, BadenBaden, Germany. In 2010, Rauch had his first major museum retrospective at the Museum der Bildenden Künste Leipzig and the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich. A version of this retrospective was recently shown at the Zache˛ta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw, in 2011.

Other venues which have presented solo exhibitions include the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Galerie Rudolfinum, Prague (both 2007); Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal; Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Germany (both 2006); Centro de Arte Contemporáneo Málaga, Spain (2005); Albertina, Vienna (2004); and the Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht, The Netherlands (2002). Major museum collections which hold works by the artist include the Gemeentemuseum, The Hague; Hamburger Bahnhof - Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin; Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Germany; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum der Bildenden Künste Leipzig; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; among others.

Image: The Knives, 2011. Oil on canvas. 19 5/8 x 16 1/2 inches (50 x 42 cm).

Opening reception: Friday, November 4, 6-8pm

David Zwirner
525 West 19th Street New York
Hours: Tuesday-Saturday 10am to 6pm. Monday by appointment
Admission free

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