Two exhibitions
dal 22/5/2013 al 24/8/2013
Segnalato da
22/5/2013
Two exhibitions
Museum Ludwig, Koln
The conceptual sculptures of Kathryn Andrews variously address issues relating to performance and presentation: she intervenes in the museum's architecture and she addresses some artistic focuses of the permanent collection. Starting out from a scarcely known core of drawings, which are flanked by major works on canvas, the Jo Baer's solo exhibition exhibition concentrates on the artist's minimalist period from 1960 to 1975 before following on to her current, figurative work.
Kathryn Andrews. Special Meat Occasional Drink
curated by Philipp Kaiser
The Museum Ludwig is mounting the first solo exhibition of work by Californian artist Kathryn Andrews to be seen in a public institution.
The conceptual sculptures of Kathryn Andrews (born in Mobile, Alabama in 1973) variously address issues relating to performance and presentation. The performance aspect is perhaps clearest in her birthday sculptures, which have the character of events as balloons are attached each year to their chrome-plated metal bars.
Other pieces by the artist incorporate rented movie props, so that the works are incomplete outside of the rental period. The previous history of the props invests them with a powerful symbolic charge. A T-shirt worn by Brad Pitt on a film set, for example, or a crash helmet used by one of the women in Charlie’s Angels evoke secret longing for film stars who are basically untouchable. This narrative or temporal dimension generates a complexity that contrasts starkly with Andrews’s very direct, ultimately Pop-derived visual vocabulary.
Galleries that the Museum Ludwig has placed at the artist’s disposal for the exhibition Special Meat Occasional Drink include a room on the third floor known in the museum as the “aquarium.” Dominated by a sequence of tall windows, this unusual exhibition space has always posed a constructive challenge to both artists and visitors. Playfully taking her cue from the faintly absurd character of the architecture, Andrews makes it the nucleus of her entire presentation: The exhibition’s central installation features an outsized screen on which colorful marine imagery appears that brings to mind a SeaWorld theme park or the two TV series Finding Nemo and Flipper. Combined with the chrome-plated surfaces of her performative sculptures, the imagery generates dynamic optical distortions that threaten to dissolve physical reality. Staged only for the duration of the exhibition, this is a work that reflects the artist’s interest in making time an integral part of her art. This theme is taken up in the two galleries outside the “aquarium.” Here Andrews evokes the passage of time in a strikingly simple way in a wall piece featuring white candles against a black background.
In this exhibition Andrews engages with the Museum Ludwig on two levels. On the one hand, she intervenes in the museum’s architecture, an intervention that can be seen both inside and outside the building. On the other, she addresses some artistic focuses of the permanent collection. In its compelling simplicity, her visual vocabulary recalls Pop Art and the stainless steel sculptures of Walter De Maria, while at the same time inhabiting a conceptual cosmos that frequently includes a narrative component. By emphatically pointing up such artistic relationships, the artist ultimately subverts the kind of art-historical classification that has appropriated the works.
A catalogue is published at Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König (144 pages, ca. 80 images) with essays by Tim Griffin and Michael Ned Holte as well as an interview between Philipp Kaiser and Kathryn Andrews.
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Jo Baer
curated by Julia Friedrich
From 24 May through 25 August 2013, the Museum Ludwig will be showcasing – as the first ever German institution to do so – the US American artist Jo Baer (*1929 in Seattle, lives since 1984 in Amsterdam) in a solo exhibition. Baer is regarded as a pioneer of Minimalism and already reached an initial high point in her career in 1975 when the Whitney Museum of American Art mounted a retrospective of her work. Starting out from a scarcely known core of drawings, which are flanked by major works on canvas, the exhibition concentrates on the artist’s minimalist period from 1960 to 1975 before following on to her current, figurative work. With around 170 works, this will be Baer’s largest overview exhibition to date.
Baer rose to fame in the 1960s and 1970s with her extremely reduced paintings in which a slender strip of color alongside a broader black band runs round the large white center of the canvas. The difference in effect of the colored strip next to a pale or a dark field, and the impact of Canvas size and format on the viewer’s perceptions are among the central topics in Baer’s painting.
After moving from New York to Ireland in 1975, Baer’s work underwent a fascinating change in style. It became representational, narrative and multicolored. She developed her principle of “Radical Figuration”, in which she traced elements from cultural history, such as archaic cave painting or ancient Grecian culture, back to their origins. This research is reflected by her paintings from 1975 onward.
The link between these two distinct phases in Baer’s creative output may be seen, according to the thesis of this exhibition, in her works on paper from the early 1960s. Her gouaches reveal an early interest in signs and symbols, and also a wider spectrum of colors. At the same time the exhibition explores her drawing as an instrument for developing new images, as prototypes and aides-mémoire. With this retrospective view, the exhibition pays tribute to the exceptional work of one of the truly great painters of our times and presents Baer as a unique and independentminded artist.
The exhibition is closely linked with the museum’s own collection. Already in the 1970s Irene and Peter Ludwig bought a number of works by Baer. In 2010 this commitment was expanded to include a group of nine early drawings and the print portfolio “Cardinations”.
The exhibition is accompanied by an extensive oeuvre catalogue published by Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, which includes texts by Julia Friedrich, Lucy R. Lippard, Lauren O'Neill-Butler, and David Raskin, and a foreword by Philipp Kaiser.
Parallel to the Museum Ludwig, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam will be showing Jo Baer’s latest works in the exhibition “In the Land of the Giants” (16 May – 1 September 2013).
Image: Kathryn Andrews, Santa Door, 2013. Aluminum, Plexiglas, and archival pigment print, 213 x 91 x 10 cm. Kathryn Andrews and David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles. Photography: Fredrik Nilsen
contact:
Anne Niermann / Leonie Pfennig
Press and Public Relations
Heinrich-Böll-Platz, 50667 Köln
Tel: +49 221 221 23491 / 23003
niermann@museum-ludwig.de
leonie.pfennig@museum-ludwig.de
Press reception: May 23, 2013, 11 a.m., opening May 24, 2013, 7 p.m.
Museum Ludwig
Heinrich-Böll-Platz - 50667 Köln
Opening times
Tue to Sun (incl. public holidays): 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.
Every 1st Thu of each month: 10 a.m. to 10 p.m.
Closed on Mondays
Admission
Tickets are valid for one day and give access to permanent and special exhibitions.
Adults: 10,00 €, concession: 7,00 € (for children, students, trainees), families: 20,00 €
Groups (min. 20): 7,50 € per person
Groups of students and teachers: free admission to permanent exhibition, 4,00 € per student/teacher for special exhibitions.
On the first Thursday of each month from 5 pm, admission charge is reduced by 50% for the permanent exhibition and to 5,00 € (concessions 3.50 €) for all special exhibitions. On these evenings the museum presents a varied programme of music, films, lectures, talks with artists and much more.
Free admission to the permanent collection for children up to 6 years, for Cologne residents up to 18 years, students (incl. 2 teachers per group), holders of the KölnPass, Cologne residents on their birthday. Admission charges for special exhibitions apply.