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26/4/2012

Three solo shows

Spruth Magers, Berlin

Jenny Holzer
Endgame

Sprüth Magers Berlin is delighted to present a solo exhibition of work by Jenny Holzer. Entitled Endgame, the exhibition includes a series of paintings marking the artist’s return to the medium after more than thirty years. Jenny Holzer searches for ways to make narrative a part of visual objects, employing an innovative range of materials and presentations to confront emotions and experiences, politics and conflict. While looking for subject matter for electronics and projections, the artist located a number of redacted, declassified government documents including policy memos, autopsy reports, and statements by American administration officials, soldiers, detainees, and others, generated during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. These opaque documents became the foundation for Holzer’s silkscreened paintings in 2005; she began to create the fully hand-painted works on show in the gallery in 2010. Color, scale and the mark of the hand are the only alterations that the artist makes; the graphic geometric shapes are the censor’s, and the surviving text is original. Holzer’s subtle alterations exacerbate how much one isn’t allowed to see.

The waterboard white, (2012) is an arrangement of rectangles and lines. Two segments consist of legible text: "detainees have undergone" and "the waterboard." The minimal appearance of language renders the painting’s impact especially striking; this is in contrast with the pale segments of redacted text that comprise the rest of the work, highlighting what remains hidden. In other paintings, Holzer transforms the redaction into units of bright color. In Top Secret 7, 2011, a blackened paragraph is reproduced as a chromatic fade, consisting of bands of blended tones. Black dissolves into purple before diminishing into red and pink. Before the paragraph ends, pale blue turns white only to open into tangerine and orange. When a document is rendered as complex painting, one can conceive of the censored article as a contrivance - what is it working to hide?

Yet these paintings function as formalist works of art, improbably evoking a long history of avant-garde abstraction, in particular the Constructivist legacy and its notion that art could be directed towards social purposes. By referencing the historical avant garde with its faith in the power of art to change the world, Holzer’s paintings ask us to consider the relationship between painting and politics in the present. Holzer started in anger and mourning when torture was institutionalized. While rigorous and meditative painting cannot undo acts or by itself conjure optimism, it can suggest a means of working that is outside of cynicism. The paintings suggests that even misplaced or fugitive hopefulness is preferable to capitulation.

Also on view is Holzer’s LED artwork, MONUMENT, 2008. Upon entering the gallery the viewer is confronted by semi-circular elements arranged as a ceiling-high tower. Like moments in the paintings, the artwork displays texts from declassified U.S. government documents stemming from the wars in the Middle East. Language that reports recent history, and speaks of power, conviction, abuse, ideals, and belief, pulses in red, blue, pink, and white light. Recognized as Holzer’s signature medium, electronic signs have been part of the artist’s practice since the early eighties, and MONUMENT demonstrates Holzer’s increasing use of the medium for its sculptural capacities. Though the artist initially turned to the LED sign for its association with news and advertising, and as a mode of direct address, she now also uses the electronic sign for its ability to manipulate space and augment architecture.

The exhibition extends to the garden where three of the artist’s benches are on display. The benches, made from either marble or sandstone, are inscribed with words from Holzer’s Truisms, 1977-79 or Erlauf, 1995. Erlauf followed the War, 1992 and Lustmord, 1993-94 text series, in which Holzer focused on the atrocities of combat. Referring to the site where Russian and American officers met to declare peace in 1945, Erlauf memorializes lives lost and peace gained in World War II. Holzer began working with stone in 1986. Her idea was to find a home for her texts that was resistant to the vagaries of time and destruction, as lasting as the light of her electronic signs is transitory. The bench form was selected because it offered people a place to sit and converse with others. The utility of the object allows her to insinuate texts that aren’t immediately consistent with the domestic or park-like settings where they might be placed.

Jenny Holzer lives and works in New York. In 1990 she represented the United States at the Venice Biennale where she won the Leone d'Oro for Best Pavilion. Solo shows include ICA, London (1988), Dia Art Foundation, New York (1989), Guggenheim Museum, New York (1989), Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (1991), Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg (2000), Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin (2001, 2011), The Barbican Centre, London (2006), Whitney Museum, New York (2009), Foundation Beyeler, Basel (2009), DHC/ART Foundation for Contemporary Art, Montreal (2010), and The Baltic, Gateshead (2010). Group shows include Whitney Museum, New York (1983, 1988, 1989, 1996), Documenta 8, Kassel (1987), Centre Pompidou, Paris (1988, 1990, 1995, 2000, 2005), MoMA, New York (1988, 1992, 1996, 1997, 2005, 2008), Hayward Gallery, London (1992), Venice Biennale, Venice (2005), The Barbican Centre, London (2008) and Victoria and Albert Museum, London (2011).

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Anthony McCall
Early Performance Films

Sprüth Magers Berlin is delighted to present an exhibition of early performance films by Anthony McCall, to coincide with the artist’s major exhibition at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin (20 April ​1 2 August 2012). The gallery will showcase three early works: Landscape for Fire (1972), Landscape for White Squares (1972) and Earth Work (1972).

Internationally recognized for groundbreaking work which occupies a space between sculpture, cinema and drawing, British-born McCall trained at Ravensbourne College of Art & Design in the mid 1960s. Shortly afterwards, in the early 1970s, he began working with performance and film, initially through a series of open-air performances which were significant for their minimal use of elements such as fire. McCall first took up filmmaking in order to record such performance works, which, in turn, led to an increasing interest in the medium of film itself, and the idea of making films that existed only in the present tense at the very moment of projection.

The three films featured in the exhibition, Landscape for Fire, Landscape for White Squares and Earth Work, originally shot in 16mm, document a series of live, outdoor, sculptural performances. All three performances were made in collaboration with Exit, a British group of musicians and artists. The earliest film, Landscape for Fire, records a performance in which a group of participants ignited containers of petrol laid out in a grid pattern across the field. Their actions were meticulously organized according to ‘scores’, drawn up by the artist beforehand, also on display here in the exhibition. Landscape for White Squares features individuals emerging out of a dense fog, carrying large, square, white sheets. Earth Work, a solo performance by McCall, is set in the grounds of Dial House, a farmhouse in North Weald, near London, where the founding members of Exit lived communally. The outdoor performance culminates in the burying of a box of earth.

The show will also feature Five Minute Drawing , a drawing resulting from a performance first realised in 1974 and performed by the artist in the gallery in 2011. The drawing takes place in actual time as the viewer observes the act of creation. Using a string previously blackened with graphite, the spectator watches the artist trace an arc onto sheets of white paper mounted in ascending order on the wall. A film of the drawing performed in New York in 2008 will be on view.

The exhibition at Sprüth Magers Berlin will run concurrently with Anthony McCall’s solo show, Five Minutes of Pure Sculpture at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin. For the artist‘s first major museum show in Germany, his horizontal solid light works will be exhibited together for the first time with his more recent vertical works. Sprüth Magers Berlin will show the working drawings for Leaving , Meeting you halfway and Breath , on display at the Hamburger Bahnhof. Anthony McCall has been awarded a large sculptural commission for 2012 by the Arts Council and the Cultural Olympiad, to realise his Column in North-West England: a sinuous column of cloud that rises from the surface of the water into the sky.

Anthony McCall lives and works in New York. Solo exhibitions include Centre Pompidou, Paris (2004), Institut d’Art Contemporain, Villeurbanne, France (2006), Musée de Rochechouart, France (2007), Serpentine Gallery, London (2007-8), Hangar Bicocca, Milan (2009), Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2009) and Ambika P3, London. Group exhibitions include ‘Into the Light: the Projected Image in American Art 1964-77’ at the Whitney Museum of American Art (2001- 2), ‘The Expanded Screen: Actions and Installations of the Sixties and Seventies’ at Museum Moderner Kunst, Vienna (2003-4), ‘The Expanded Eye’ at the Kunsthaus Zürich (2006), ‘Beyond Cinema: the Art of Projection’ at the Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2006-7), ‘The Cinema Effect: Illusion, Reality and the Projected Image’ at the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington DC (2008), ‘On Line: Drawing Through the Twentieth Century’ at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2010-11) and ‘Off the Wall’ at Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Serralves, Porto (2011). Sprüth Magers Berlin will also be concurrently presenting the solo exhibitions development by Robert Elfgen and Endgame by Jenny Holzer.

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Robert Elfgen
Development

Monika Sprüth und Philomene Magers freuen sich, eine neue Ausstellung von Robert Elfgen in Berlin zu zeigen.

Robert Elfgen beschäftigt sich mit dem Verhältnis von Natur, Mensch und Gesellschaft. Als Ausgangspunkt seiner Arbeiten dienen dem Künstler biographische Erfahrungen und Alltagsbeobachtungen. Betritt man eine seiner raumbezogenen Installationen, verbinden sich assoziativ Skulpturen, Assemblagen, Collagen und Filme zu räumlichen Allegorien, die eine private Mythologie erfahrbar machen. Übergangssituationen, soziale Schwellenrituale, der Kreislauf der Natur und der Wechsel von Aggregatszuständen: materielle und immaterielle Transfers liefern die Motive seiner symbolischen und oft skurrilen Bildwelten.

Die Arbeiten selbst verbinden handwerklich perfekte Ausführung mit Improvisation. Alte künstlerische Techniken wie Glasgravur, Intarsien, Metallätzungen, Hochdruck und ihre sorgfältige Ausführung stehen gebrauchten Materialien, gefundenen Objekten, Zufallsergebnissen und mechanischen Spielereien gegenüber.

Häufig arbeitet Elfgen über einen längeren Zeitraum mit formalen Leitmotiven, die er der Natur entnimmt. Zu diesen Serien gehören Tiere aus Holzfurnier, die er vor monochromem Hintergrund montiert; abstrakt-geometrische ​G emälde’, welche die Architektur von Bienenstöcken imitieren oder milchige, semitransparente Oberflächen und Hintergründe, die an Lichtstimmungen in der Natur erinnern. Die Arbeiten bewegen sich im Spannungsfeld von Abstraktion und Gegenständlichkeit. Trotz ihrer physischen Präsenz erhalten sie dadurch einen ephemeren Charakter.

Wiederkehrend ist auch das Spiel mit realer und illusionistischer Räumlichkeit in den Collagen wie in den Installationen. Elfgen bezieht die Architektur des Ausstellungsortes in die Gesamtkonzeption mit ein, wodurch die Installationen eine einmalige Existenz erhalten. Ähnlich sakraler Kunst und Architektur erzeugt Elfgen eine sinnbildliche Totalität, die sich durch physische Bewegung und Einfühlung vermittelt.

Robert Elfgens neue Ausstellung development führt uns ​stabile Ungleichgewichte’ vor. Spielerisch ​ humorvoll und ironisch umkreist er das Verhältnis von Produktion und Verwertung in Kunst, Gesellschaft und Natur. In diesem Feld verhandelt er Fragen der künstlerischen Produktion als transformierenden Prozess und künstlerische Autorschaft als dynamisches Konzept.

seeblick (2012), eine Assemblage aus Versatzstücken eines Beichtstuhls und einer Skateboardrampe auf der Rückseite, verlangsamt das Eintreten in den Raum, bestimmt die Bewegungsrichtung und nimmt den Blick auf das Dahinterliegende. Symbolisches und Funktionales, Doppelseitiges, Ernst und Spiel, Gefundenes und Gebautes sind miteinander kombiniert in einer Bricolage, die Elfgen hier als handwerkliche wie inhaltliche Methode verwendet.

Im anschließenden Raum entspinnt development mit weiteren Assemblagen, Objets trouvés und Collagen ein offenes Geflecht aus Bezügen. An den Wänden sind die Collagen in freier Petersburger Hängung präsentiert. Elfgen greift auch in diesen auf vorgefundenes Material zurück: Kopien von Motiven aus dem Internet sind mit Stoffen und Furnier auf Holzgrund kombiniert und entwickeln kleine surreale Geschichten. Die in einem Zufallsprinzip bestimmten Titel ergänzen diese Narrationen mehrdeutig.

Brandenburg (2012), ein im Wald gefundender Baumstamm, trägt deutlich die Spuren von Blitzeinschlag und Insektenbefall und ergänzt als reines Naturprodukt die industriell angefertigten Objets trouvés der anderen Skulpturen. Durch die Positionierung des Baumes vor den Fenstern mit Blick in den Garten wird die Ausstellung in ein erweitertes Verhältnis zur Natur gesetzt.

Robert Elfgen studierte zunächst bei John Armleder an der Hochschule der Bildenden Künste Braunschweig, bevor er an die Kunstakademie Düsseldorf wechselte und dort als Meisterschüler von Rosemarie Trockel sein Studium abschloss. Er lebt und arbeitet in Köln. Einzelausstellungen der vergangenen Jahre waren des bien ich , Sprüth Magers Köln, 2008, expedition , westlondonprojects, London, 2006 und 1+1 = 3 Elfgen ​ Technik, Bonner Kunstverein, 2005. Zudem war er an Gruppenausstellungen beteiligt wie Paul Thek ​ Werkschau im Kontext zeitgenössischer Kunst, ZKM Karlsruhe (2007-2008), Lieber Friedrich , Kunstverein Kassel (2006) und "7", Sprüth Magers Lee, London (2005). 2012 werden neue Arbeiten des Künstlers in Gruppenausstellungen im Museum Morsbroich, Leverkusen, und in der Galerie Helga de Alvaers, Madrid, zu sehen sein. Im Juni 2012 erscheint ein Katalog zur Ausstellung. Zeitgleich zu dieser Ausstellung zeigt Sprüth Magers Berlin die Einzelausstellungen Endgame von Jenny Holzer und Early Performance Films von Anthony McCall.

Image: Jenny Holzer, TOP SECRET green fade, U.S. government document, 2011. Oil on linen, 147,3 x 111,8 x 3,8 cm (unframed)

For more information, interviews, or images, please contact Roxana Pennie at Sutton PR:
T: +44 (0) 20 7183 3577
E: Roxana@suttonpr.com

For further information and press enquiries please contact Silvia Baltschun
(sb@spruethmagers.com).

Private View: Friday, 27 April, 6-9pm

Sprüth Magers
Oranienburger Straße 18, D-10178 Berlin
Opening hours: Tuesday – Saturday, 11am-6pm
Admission: Free

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