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23/2/2012

Three exhibitions

Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo

Curators: Ida Kierulf and Mats Stjernstedt

Photography and film will dominate the upcoming exhibition period at Kunstnernes Hus, with three exhibitions from February 24 to April 22 showcasing the internationally renowned artists Hans-Peter Feldmann, Elad Lassry, and João Maria Gusmão & Pedro Paiva. The works in all three exhibitions employ and refine classical camera-based expressions such as still lifes, studio portraits, and 16 mm films. The artists represent a variety of conceptual positions that relate to the ongoing discussion on the understanding of and desire for images.

Hans-Peter Feldmann

Hans-Peter Feldmann (b. 1941) lives and works in Düsseldorf, Germany, and is considered to be one of the leading lights of conceptual art. Since the 1960s he has built up an extensive photo archive of public and private photographs from magazines, journals, and photo albums. The photographs have been collected and organized in series and books in accordance with the artist’s personal vision. Feldmann toys with aesthetic and visual hierarchies and assigns the same value to each picture regardless of their original context. His archaeological excavations into iconography reflect the picture as both a private and a collective object of desire. The exhibition at Kunstnernes Hus presents the work 100 Years, a monumental photographic series consisting of 101 portraits of people aged 8 months to 100 years that represent a temporal frieze of the life-cycle.

Hans-Peter Feldmann has featured extensively in international exhibitions, including Documenta V and Documenta VI in Kassel, the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and the Venice Biennale in 2003 and 2009.

Elad Lassry

Elad Lassry (b. 1977) was born in Tel Aviv, Israel, and resides in Los Angeles, USA. With his vibrantly chromatic still lifes, photo collages, and studio portraits, Lassry figures prominently in the current international art scene. He represents a trend within contemporary photography that experiments with the materiality of photography and with processes that verge on painting and sculpture. This is a type of photograph that does not seek to document a social reality, but that is constructed in the studio and the darkroom.
Lassrys point of departure is images that are continuously recycled in a visual culture and that are thereby divested of meaning – he himself refers to such images as orphaned. Despite motifs that are seemingly mundane and familiar – a portrait of kittens, an arrangement of Christmas decorations – he manages to conjure up uncertainty about what we actually see, as though the pictures can simultaneously mean everything and nothing. Lassry achieves this by stripping the pictures of every reference to their origin or original context and by focusing on their formal qualities, such as light, colour, and surface. Lassry wishes thereby to examine whether pictures can communicate as pure presence with the viewer.
The photographed objects are placed in front of colourful backgrounds and are framed with the same colour as the photograph’s dominant colour. Lassry thereby highlights the pictures as objects and creates interaction between surface and depth and between abstraction and figuration. This may also be seen in the exhibition’s other elements, which include charcoal drawings, sculptures, architectonic interventions, and a 16 mm film. The various elements all interact and create a sense that the room itself can be activated as a picture.

Elad Lassry has exhibited his works at e.g. last year’s Venice Biennale, the Whitney Museum in New York, White Cube in London, Tramway in Glasgow, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Kunsthalle in Zurich, and was recently nominated for a Deutsche Börse Photography Prize in London.

João Maria Gusmão & Pedro Paiva

João Maria Gusmão & Pedro Paiva (b. 1979 / 1977) live and work in Lisbon, Portugal. Their art production, which spans 16 mm films, sculpture, installations, and text, builds on an extensive repertoire of philosophical and scientific texts. The exhibition, titled Since You Have Eaten the Horse, You Can Travel to Rome by Donkey: On Dwarf Philosophy, is one of their most extensive gatherings to date, featuring over twenty 16 mm films produced during 2003–2011. Gusmão and Paiva’s short films depict staged episodes in a series of pseudo-scientific experiments with both poetical and comical consequences. A key element in Gusmão and Paiva’s art is their fascination for what eludes our understanding and undermines the rational – the purely empirical is combined with an understanding of the impossible in an absolute knowledge of the world.

João Maria Gusmão and Pedro Paiva have held exhibitions in several international institutions, including the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts in San Francisco, the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham (UK), and the Museu Nacional de Arte Contemporânea in Lisbon. They have also participated in several international exhibitions such as Manifesta in 2008 and the São Paulo Art Biennial in 2006. The artists also represented Portugal at the Venice Biennale in 2009 with the exhibition Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air.

Press contact:
Johanne Færevaag Nome Tel: 22 85 34 17/ 92655890 E-mail: jfn@kunstnerneshus.no

Kunstnernes Hus
Wergelandsveien 17 NO-0167 Oslo

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