Franz Gertsch/Chris Burden
dal 19/1/2004 al 28/2/2004
Segnalato da
19/1/2004
Franz Gertsch/Chris Burden
Gagosian Gallery, New York
Gertsch's fascination with the minute details of his subjects culminates in his series of portrait paintings, inaugurated with the artist's Self-Portrait (1980), on view in the exhibition. Also exhibited will be several of Gertsch's monumental woodcuts from the early 1990s, whose details of rippling water or blades of grass offer poetic, almost abstracted, depictions of the natural world. On view Burden's recent works. Tyne Bridge comprises 200,000 steel parts that have been cast from Meccano model toy pieces and coated with green paint to match the patina of the original bridge. Since 1997, Burden has built a series of scaled reproductions of bridges using parts from Meccano and Erector engineering sets, popular children's toys during the last century.
FRANZ GERTSCH
The Gagosian Gallery is pleased to announce an upcoming exhibition of paintings and large-scale woodcuts by Franz Gertsch.
On view will be Gertsch's Patti Smith series of five paintings dating from 1977-79. Fashioned after photographs taken by the artist, all but one of the works document Smith's 1977 performance at the Galerie Veith Turske in Cologne. The final painting in the series records Smith's visit to Gertsch's studio and home in 1979. Realist in style, the paintings offer snapshot views of their subject in action while eclipsing the greater context of the performance space. The images presented in these paintings, as well as the earlier At Luciano's House (1973), offer selective accounts of reality that are modified through the imagination of the artist. Gertsch's fascination with the minute details of his subjects culminates in his series of portrait paintings, inaugurated with the artist's Self-Portrait (1980), on view in the exhibition. Also exhibited will be several of Gertsch's monumental woodcuts from the early 1990s, whose details of rippling water or blades of grass offer poetic, almost abstracted, depictions of the natural world.
Gertsch was born in 1930 in Mörigen, Switzerland. His work reflects both the contemporary sensibility of Pop art, as well as more traditional oil painting and printing techniques. Gertsch has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions and participated in the 1972 Documenta V in Kassel, as well as the 1978 and the 1999 Venice Biennales. The Patti Smith paintings were the subject of a 2003 exhibition organized by the Museum Franz Gertsch, Burgdorf, which traveled to the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich before arriving here. This will be Gertsch's first exhibition at Gagosian.
CHRIS BURDEN
The Gagosian Gallery is pleased to announce its upcoming exhibition of Chris Burden's recent works. On view will be the Tyne Bridge (2002), a 31-foot-long scale replica of the single-span bridge erected in 1928 across the Tyne River in northern England, as well as two Tyne Bridge Kits (2003), which each include the 151,000 parts necessary to potentially construct Burden's bridge. The monumental Curved Bridge (2003) will also be exhibited, along with several smaller-scale bridges.
Tyne Bridge comprises 200,000 steel parts that have been cast from Meccano model toy pieces and coated with green paint to match the patina of the original bridge. Since 1997, Burden has built a series of scaled reproductions of bridges using parts from Meccano and Erector engineering sets, popular children's toys during the last century. Tyne Bridge is the sixth of this series and was commissioned for the opening of the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead, England, the home of the original Tyne Bridge. Curved Bridge, which does not reference an actual bridge, is an equally dramatic form that similarly tests the aesthetic and mechanical boundaries of its model parts.
Born in Boston in 1946, Burden studied architecture, physics, and visual art at the University of California. He completed a series of performance pieces in the 1970s that engaged his own body, often in a violent manner, as part of his conceptual art practice. In recent years, Burden has noted that “my work has gone from dealing with personal issues of power to external issues of power.†His appreciation of well-engineered structures, coupled with a fascination with technology, has led to Burden's rendering of several fantasy societies in a reduced scale, including Medusa's Head, 1990, and Pizza City, 1996. Uniting his performances and sculptures in a body of work that invites human interaction, Burden's bridges function as inquiries into the nature of architecture and technology, while instigating a dialogue between human beings and scientific progress.
Image: Chris Burden, Tyne Bridge (detail), 2002 Meccano, 31' x 5' x 9' 3"
Reception for the artists: Tuesday, January 20, 6:00 – 8:00pm
Gagosian Gallery
555 WEST 24th STREET NEW YORK NY 10011