calendario eventi  :: 

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28/2/2013

Two exhibitions

Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac - Marais, Paris

Jack Pierson
Ennui (la vie continue)
02 Mar 2013 - 06 Apr 2013

Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac is pleased to announce Ennui (la vie continue) – 'Ennui (life goes on)', the sixth solo exhibition by American artist Jack Pierson.

Pierson continues his experiments into the wealth of mental associations triggered through his sculptures made of found commercial signage. In this exhibition Pierson takes on the important questions besetting Western culture.

The sculpture 'THESE ETERNAL QUESTIONS' confronts the visitor with the founding mechanisms of Greek philosophy. Questioning the eternal questions is particularly relevant insofar as there is nothing intrinsically eternal about them – at some point, those questions must inevitably have been asked for the first time. The artist involves us in the beginnings of thought and human awareness.

Jack Pierson continues with 'HIS QUIET WATERS', a direct reference to the biblical text the 23rd Psalm: "He makes me lie down in green pastures, He leads me beside quiet waters”. Pierson thus references that other great source of knowledge in western culture, the Judeo- Christian tradition. Where the Greek philosophical tradition perhaps asks more questions than it answers, the bible, which is traditionally considered to be the word of God, constitutes a set of guidelines for humanity.

With short, sharp, sometimes blunt sayings and proverbs, Pierson raises existential as well as poetic and political questions. He ponders over the principle of narrative so that the exhibition offers a quintessentially cathartic experience in the manner of a film script. In installing the works in the gallery space, Pierson reconstructs the script for the several-thousand-year history of human prevarication in its search for the meaning of existence. And in so doing, affirms the narrative power of the exhibition.

The parallel with the universe of film continues in the major work in the exhibition. The main gallery space is dominated by the gigantic "DREAM" installation. It is both a demonstration of the power of the imagination and a homage to the major role played by dreams in intellectual constructs and the answers that can sometimes be obtained from them.

What if, like a cliffhanger in the last minutes of a film, the exhibition drew to a close with a phrase setting off new questions?

Jack Pierson was born in 1960 in Plymouth, Massachusets. While studying at the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston, he and four other artist photographers, including Nan Goldin, founded a group known as the Boston Five. He divides his time between New York City and his house in the desert to the east of Los Angeles. Works by Jack Pierson feature in major collections worldwide, including LACMA and MoCA, Los Angeles, Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum, and the Guggenheim in New York, and the CAPC, Bordeaux, France.

For all inquiries regarding this exhibition, please contact Elena Bortolotti, elena@ropac.at. For all press and visual materials, please contact Alessandra Bellavita, alessandra@ropac.net or Marcus Rothe, marcus@ropac.net.

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Gerwald Rockenschaub
DOING THE SAME AGAIN
March 2, 2013 - April 6, 2013

Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac is pleased to present recent works from Gerwald Rockenschaub’s two series Pralinen [chocolates] and Intarsien [marquetry], a series of sculptures and some wall objects. The Pralinen are a series of small-scale, painted, cuboid wooden objects, which in their setting are reminiscent of the design of luxury confectionery. The Intarsien, also of wood, are based on the type of inlaid work that flourished during the Italian Renaissance. Different varieties of wood veneer are laid on a flat surface to form patterns of varying colours and structures. The geometric aesthetic of Rockenschaub's sculptures shows the design process using the CAD programVectorworks, while at the same time they are strongly reminiscent of models of Russian constructivist architectural fantasies. The wall objects are based on motifs from a work created in Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg in 2011 but, unlike that wall, here the icons are transferred from foil applications into the higher-value medium of milled and painted wood objects about 5 cm. in depth. These works, between hard-edge aesthetic and DIY romanticism, are typical of Rockenschaub's ideology-free fluctuation between "high" and popular culture.

The work of the Austrian artist Gerwald Rockenschaub (b 1952) has been associated with the term "neo-geo" since the early 1980s, which saw the formation of a group of young artists who used the formal vocabulary of the abstract avant-garde. Neo-geo permeated the aesthetic of American minimal art with the consumeristic attitude of pop art. Rockenschaub's work cannot, however, be categorised simply as a specific style. In his animations, in the Pralinen and Intarsien – which draw on classic panel painting –, in the wall objects, sculptures and room-specific installations, he relates in equal measure to ideas and positions of the modern age and to phenomena of everyday culture. In an act of radical reduction and concentration (the two basic principles of Rockenschaub's method) these are reduced to their essential element.

Rockenschaub's pictures are no longer based on the social or metaphysical utopias found in the pioneers of abstraction, but on abstract codes and patterns from the everyday world. Rockenschaub undermines the "characterisation" of the picture by deliberately withdrawing everything that might constitute individuality in a painting. Linear structures, individual geometric forms and colour fields suggest a narrative level, which the viewer has to draw on his own store of images to decipher. The aesthetic system of the Bauhaus, Kandinsky's abstract cosmos and the artistic concepts of pop art all show their influence, in roughly equal measure. One of the most outstanding characteristics of Rockenschaub's method is his advanced concept of production, with regard to the use and appropriation of modern technologies. He is one of the first artists to make use of a formal vocabulary which includes computer-generated graphics. Moreover, Rockenschaub has for years been an internationally respected DJ in the field of electronic music. This is reflected in the technoid aesthetic of his work, as well as in the title of his exhibition at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac in Salzburg in 2011: If I ever had the chance again, Iʼd probably do the same, from the song Never, Never (2011) by the British dubstep SBTRKT.

This exhibition takes place after Gerwald Rockenschaub's major retrospective, held in Wolfsburg Kunstmuseum April - September 2011, after his room-specific installations at the documenta in Kassel (2007) and his effective design for the exterior of the temporary Kunsthalle ["art hall"] on the Berlin Schlossplatz.

For all inquiries regarding this exhibition, please contact Victoire de Pourtalès, victoire@ropac.at. For all press and visual materials, please contact Alessandra Bellavita, alessandra@ropac.net or Marcus Rothe, marcus@ropac.net

Image: Jack Pierson, Untitled, 2001. Type C-print, 76.2 x 101.6 cm (30 x 40 in)

Press conference: Friday 1st March 12PM

Opening on Saturday 2 March from 5pm to 7pm

Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac
7 rue Debelleyme 75003 Paris
Hours: Tuesday - Saturday 10a.m. - 7p.m.

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