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31/10/2012

Two solo exhibitions

David Zwirner, New York

Francis Alÿs
REEL-UNREEL

David Zwirner is pleased to present an exhibition of recent work by Francis Alÿs, on view at the gallery’s 525 and 533 West 19th Street spaces in New York. REEL-UNREEL includes a film the artist made in Kabul, Afghanistan, depicting a street game played by local children, as well as a series of paintings of color bars. The film will be screened throughout the duration of the show.

Belgian-born Francis Alÿs’s multifaceted actions and works in various media occupy a unique position within the contemporary art world. Widely known for his distinct and poetic sensibility towards social and geopolitical issues, the artist has described his practice as “a sort of discursive argument composed of episodes, metaphors, or parables.” His works, as Mark Godfrey has observed, are defined by their “fantastical absurdity...their transience or incompletion, their imaginative imagery, and most of all...their enigmatic openness to interpretation.” The artist’s numerous projects have involved pushing a melting block of ice through the streets of Mexico City, circumnavigating the globe in order to avoid crossing the border between Mexico and the United States, walking through Copenhagen under the influence of a different drug each day for a week, and filming his attempts to penetrate the eye of a tornado. Produced for dOCUMENTA (13), the video REEL-UNREEL (made in collaboration with Ajmal Maiwandi and Julien Devaux) takes its point of departure in the classic street game in which children keep a hoop in continuous motion with the help of a stick. Yet, in Alÿs’s version, the hoop is replaced with a film reel. The camera follows a flock of boys as they excitedly chase the reel down the hills of Kabul, with one boy unrolling the strip of film and leading the way, while another follows him, rewinding it. The title REEL-UNREEL alludes to the real/unreal image of Afghanistan conveyed by the media in the West: how the Afghan way of life, along with its people, has gradually been dehumanized and, after decades of war, turned into a Western fiction.

While the video offers an alternative to the habitual mainstream media coverage of Kabul, a series of accompanying paintings by Alÿs reminds us of the difficulty of representing the daily reality of war through any medium. Deceptively looking like abstract geometric paintings, these works show a repertoire of color bar combinations that the artist came across between 2010 and 2012, the period during which he was scouting, preparing, filming, and editing the video in Afghanistan. Used by video engineers as test patterns in between televised programming, color bars are electronically produced to correct chrominance and luminance on TV screens. Alÿs’s painted versions, thus, are bound to fail as illustrations. Yet more so than challenging the issue of medium specificity, they reflect the artist’s impossibility of converting his experiences in Afghanistan into images. As he has noted, “Over those two years, the activity of obsessively painting color bars became an indispensable pendant to my travels in Afghanistan. Whether they reflect my difficulty to translate what I felt, or whether they simply became a therapeutic exercise at home in order to digest the flood of information received upon each visit, the viewer can decide.”

Born in 1959 in Antwerp, Belgium, Francis Alÿs originally trained as an architect. He moved to Mexico City in 1986, where he continues to live and work, and it was the confrontation with issues of urbanization and social unrest in his country of adoption that inspired his decision to become a visual artist. Since 2004, his work has been represented by David Zwirner, where he had his critically acclaimed solo exhibition, Sometimes Doing Something Poetic Can Become Political and Sometimes Doing Something Political Can Become Poetic, in 2007.

Alÿs was recently the subject of a major survey, Francis Alÿs: A Story of Deception, which was on view from 2010 to 2011 at Tate Modern, London; Wiels Centre d’Art Contemporain, Brussels; and The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and MoMA PS1, Long Island City, New York. Over the past decade, he has had several solo exhibitions at prominent venues, including the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2010); The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago (2008); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2007); Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Portikus, Frankfurt (both 2006); among others.

In 2012, Alÿs’s work was featured in dOCUMENTA (13), where a selection of his new color bar paintings were installed in a former bakery in Kassel’s city center and REEL-UNREEL was screened at a satellite venue in Kabul. He has participated in a number of international group exhibitions, including the São Paulo Biennale (2010, 2004, and 1998); Venice Biennale (2007, 2001, and 1999); Shanghai Biennale (2002); Istanbul Biennial (2001 and 1999); and the Havana Biennial (2000 and 1994).

Work by the artist is found in public collections worldwide, including the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan; The Art Institute of Chicago; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, Luxembourg; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; and Tate Gallery, London.

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Luc Tuymans
The Summer is Over

David Zwirner is pleased to present Luc Tuymans’s tenth solo exhibition with the gallery, on view at 519 West 19th Street in New York. The Summer is Over overlaps with Tuymans’s ninth solo show Allo!, which recently inaugurated David Zwirner’s new gallery on 24 Grafton Street in Mayfair, London, and runs through November 17. The exhibitions are accompanied by a catalogue featuring a detailed overview of each of the artist’s exhibitions with the gallery since 1994. Also included is a conversation between the artist and David Zwirner as well as interviews by Lynne Tillman with Madeleine Grynsztejn, Brice Marden, Helen Molesworth, Peter Schjeldahl, and Robert Storr. The catalogue simultaneously marks the gallery’s twenty year anniversary in February 2013.

Tuymans is widely credited with having contributed to the revival of painting in the 1990s. His sparsely colored, figurative works speak in a quiet, restrained, and at times unsettling voice, and are typically painted from pre-existing imagery which includes photographs and video stills. His canvases, in turn, become third-degree abstractions from reality and often appear slightly out-of-focus, as if covered by a thin veil or painted from a failing memory. There is almost always a darker undercurrent to what at first appear to be innocuous subjects: Tuymans has, in this way, explored diverse and sensitive topics including the Holocaust, the effects of images from 9/11, the ambiguous utopia of the Disney empire, the colonial history of his native Belgium, and the phenomenon of the corporation.

The Summer is Over occupies an unusual place within Tuymans’s career in that it does not take its point of departure in a broader cultural or political context. Rather, the works in the new series depict the artist’s immediate surroundings, and interior views of his home and a rare self-portrait are complemented by views of buildings he walks past every day on the way to his studio. Yet unfamiliar perspectives and the simulation of other media—the paintings are based on photographs—restrict biographical insights into the artist’s life.

The opaqueness that characterizes the works is particularly apparent in Morning Sun (2011), the first painting Tuymans created for the exhibition. Showing a window from across the street, the off-center composition reveals no reflected sunlight as otherwise hinted at by the title, but shows an impenetrable façade of dusty, cracked glass. In turn, it draws attention to the surface of the canvas and its intrinsic flatness.

Windows and façades are featured in several of the paintings and light, whether direct or reflected, plays an important part, sometimes bleaching out details or otherwise obscuring a straightforward reading of the subject matter. The dramatic contrast between brightness and shadow in Wall (2011), for example, makes it difficult to decipher the actual composition. What at first appears to be daylight streaming in from a window is an electronic image projected onto a wall, showing footage from a Super 8 film the artist made in the 1980s of an abandoned seaman’s hotel. As Tuymans’s painting is based on a photograph of the film screening, several media representations of light are conflated at once.

Me (2011) depicts Tuymans himself seated in a large chair adjacent to a wall. A glimpse of the room is offered in the background, with a large radiator taking up most of the view. Illuminated from behind, the artist appears passive and inattentive, and his gaze, almost masked by the reflections on his glasses, seems to slightly miss the viewer’s. Based on a photograph taken by his wife, the artist Carla Arocha, this is not the first time Tuymans’s figure makes its way into a composition—his shadow or reflection is sometimes discernable in his paintings—but his direct, frontal presence is unusual. Yet the intimacy that typically accompanies the genre of self-portraiture is altogether lacking and the larger-than-life-sized portrait rather reminds us of the disappearance or nonexistence of an original source within today’s image-saturated society.

My Leg (2011) underscores the inherent futility of seeking to deduce biographical details from the works in the show, showing a fragment of the artist’s leg that appears more abstract than figurative. The illusory nature that characterizes the history of the medium is not only refuted but turned inside out, as the paintings gradually divulge their subjects only to conceal them at the moment of their revelation.

Born in 1958 in Morstel, near Antwerp, Belgium, Luc Tuymans was one of the first artists to be represented by David Zwirner. He joined the gallery in 1994 and had his first American solo exhibition that same year.

An exhibition of Tuymans’s prints from 1989 to the present opens at Brooke Alexander in New York on November 3, 2012, highlighting the collaborations between the artist and printer Roger Vandaele. Luc Tuymans - Roger Vandaele: Graphic Works 1989-2012 features sixteen projects that conceptually and formally follow Tuymans’s paintings.

The artist’s work was recently the subject of a retrospective co-organized by the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. It traveled from 2010 to 2011 to the Dallas Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; and the Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels. Previous major solo exhibitions include those organized by the Moderna Museet Malmö, Sweden, in 2009, and Tate Modern, London, in 2004. Other recent solo exhibitions include the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Málaga, Spain (2011); Haus der Kunst, Munich; Zacheta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw (both 2008); Mucsarnok Kunsthalle, Budapest (2007); Museu Serralves, Porto, Portugal; and the Musée d’art moderne et contemporain, Geneva (both 2006).

In 2009, Tuymans was the curator of The State of Things: Brussels/Beijing at the Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels, which traveled to the National Art Museum of China, Beijing, and A Vision of Central Europe at the Brugge Centraal, Bruges, Belgium, in 2010. A catalogue raisonné of the artist’s paintings is currently being prepared by David Zwirner in collaboration with Studio Luc Tuymans. Compiled and edited by art historian Eva Meyer-Hermann, the catalogue raisonné will illustrate and document approximately 500 paintings by the artist from 1975 to the present day.

The artist represented Belgium at the 49th Venice Biennale (2001) and his works are featured in museum collections worldwide, including The Art Institute of Chicago; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and Tate Gallery, London. Tuymans recently donated his portrait of Her Majesty Queen Beatrix of The Netherlands to the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. He lives and works in Antwerp.

Image: REEL-UNREEL, Kabul, Afghanistan, 2011 (still). In collaboration with Julien Devaux and Ajmal Maiwandi. Video, 19:28 min.

For all press inquiries, please contact
Julia Joern at David Zwirner 212-727-2070 julia@davidzwirner.com

Opening reception: Thursday, November 1, 6 – 8 PM

David Zwirner
525 West 19th Street - New York, NY 10011
Tuesday – Saturday, 10 AM – 6 PM
Monday by appointment

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