calendario eventi  :: 

X

14/11/2013

Suzan Frecon / Eric Baudelaire

Galerie Greta Meert, Bruxelles

Eric Baudelaire
The Anabasis & The Ugly One

Galerie Greta Meert is pleased to present The Ugly One, a feature film by Eric Baudelaire, the second chapter of the artist’s collaboration with Masao Adachi, pioneering filmmaker of the Japanese New Wave and former member of the Japanese Red Arrmy. For the first time since its premiere at the Locarno Film Festival, the film is presented as an installation in the first floor gallery space. On the second floor, the inaugural chapter of Baudelaire and Adachi’s collaboration is projected: The Anabasis of May and Fusako Shigenobu, Masao Adachi, and 27 Years Without Images, a 66 minute movie, accompanied by a series of documents and works on paper, unfolding a complex entanglement between cinema and terrorism. At the time of its first screening at FID Marseille, Jean-Pierre Rehm wrote the following words about the film:
“Who are May and Fusako Shigenobu? Fusako — leader of an extremist left-wing faction, the Japanese Red Army, involved in a number of terrorist operations — has been in hiding in Beirut for almost 30 years. May, her daughter, born in Lebanon, only discovered Japan at the age of twenty-seven, after her motherʼs arrest in 2000. And Masao Adachi? A screenwriter and radical activist filmmaker, committed to armed struggle and the Palestinian cause, was also underground in Lebanon for several decades before being sent back to his native country. In his years as a film director, he had been one of the instigators of a ʻtheory of landscapeʼ — fukeiron: through filming landscapes, Adachi sought to reveal the structures of oppression that underpin and perpetuate the political system. Anabasis? The name given, since Xenophon, to wandering, circuitous homeward journeys.

It is this complicated, dark, and always suspenseful story that Eric Baudelaire — an artist renowned for using photography as a means of questioning the staging of reality — chose to bring forth using the documentary format. Filmed on Super 8 mm, and in the manner of fukeiron, contemporary panoramas of Tokyo and Beirut are blended in with archival footage, TV clips and film excerpts as backdrop for May and Adachiʼs voices and memories. They speak of everyday life, of being a little girl in hiding, of exile, politics and cinema, and their fascinating overlap. All of which adds up not so much to an enquiry as a fragmented anamnesis.”

Eric Baudelaire is a French visual artist and filmmaker born in Salt Lake City in 1973. He has recently participated in La Triennale at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris (cur. Okwui Enwezor), Documentary Forum / A Blind Spot at the HKW in Berlin (cur. Catherine David), and the Taipei Biennale (cur. Anselm Franke). His work is included in the collections of the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the MACBA in Barcelona, the Whitney Museum in New York and the Kadist Art Foundation. This is his second solo exhibition at the gallery.

The Ugly One was produced with the support of the Audi talents awards, la Fondation Nationale des Arts Graphiques et Plastiques, Le Centre National du Cinema / DICRéAM, Kadist Art Foundation, Beirut Art Center and L’Office du Tourisme du Liban in Paris. L’Anabase de May et Fusako Shigenobu, Masao Adachi, et 27 années sans images was produced with the support of the Centre national des arts plastiques.

------

Suzan Frecon

The Greta Meert Gallery has great pleasure in presenting the latest work of Suzan Frecon (born in 1941 in Mexico, Pennsylvania, and living and working in New York.) For her first solo exhibition in our gallery 17 small scale pieces have been carefully selected.

Since the sixties Suzan Frecon has been working in watercolour and in oil. In the transition period from late modernism to the first manifestations of the minimalist movement, painting was incorporated into a theoretical discourse on objecthood, the plane of painting, and referentiality. Suzan Frecon's work is widely held to occupy an absolutely unique position in the development of American abstract art.

Suzan Frecon’s palette ranges widely, from bright colours that reflect light, to earthy shades that absorb light. Deep, rich pigments such as earth red and ultramarine dominate a saturated base, and lend a physical, nearly material quality to colour in Suzan Frecon's work.

“The colour is usually the starting point of a painting”

Frecon’s work is composed of a limited number of colour planes. Hard to pin down in words - shapes, figures, motifs ? - they appear to relate to emotional experience rather than to language. They exude an intuitive and evocative force. The irregular shapes and the variable sizes of the paper are fully respected and at the same time form an integral part of the structure of each work.

This unadulterated choice of materials strongly characterises Suzan Frecon's work. She mostly uses mineral pigment and ioxides that she mixes herself. This choice also charges her work with history, with echoes of primitive, Byzantine and Pre-renaissance art. Yet she rejects a narrative or symbolic interpretation of her work, the impact of which is solely a consequence of the pictorial qualities of the materials that are used.

“The physical reality and the spiritual content of my paintings are the same.”

In 2008 Suzan Frecon’s work was the subject of a major solo exhibition at the Menil Collection. This exhibition subsequently travelled to the Kunstmuseum Bern, Switzerland. Her work was selected for the 2010 Whitney Biennial, and is included in international public and museum collections, such as the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University, the Kunstmuseum Bern, Switzerland, the Menil Collection, Houston, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the National Gallery of Art, Washington, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

The Greta Meert Gallery
Vaartstraat 13 Rue du Canal 1000 Bruxelles
Hours:
Tuesday to Saturday, 2pm - 6pm

stampa

permanent link