calendario eventi  :: 

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4/9/2014

Two exhibitions

Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac - Pantin, Paris

Oliver Beer
DIABOLUS IN MUSICA

The Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac is delighted to present Diabolus in Musica, the first exhibition of works by Oliver Beer at our gallery and our second collaboration with him after the performance Composition for Hearing an Architectural Space, in October 2013.

Oliver Beer’s exhibition will be exploring people’s ability to imbue objects and phenomena with an emotional, poetic or simply narrative charge, through the power of the imagination. This human tendency will be given partial form in an architectural acoustic installation based on a famous mythical chord, which in musical theory is called the tritone. It is an interval of three whole tones and corresponds to a diminished fifth. It was used in musical writing in the late mediaeval period but then banned by religious leaders. The sound produced by a diminished fifth or an augmented fourth is perceived by the ear as an unpleasant sound that provokes a sense of incompleteness and unease that earned it the sobriquet ‘Diabolus in Musica’. The popular collective unconscious gradually developed a tendency to think that the sound might conjure up the devil.

The interval has since been widely used in musical genres that have broken with classical tone relationships. In both jazz and Heavy Metal, for example, a number of melody lines are constructed around this association of unbalanced notes. The resulting musical experience for the listener is based on that sense of something incomplete and out of kilter, which challenges not the universal but something unusual in the sound experience. It is precisely this experience that Oliver Beer’s installation offers us, with a structure that totally envelops the spectator.

The exhibition is also presenting Reanimation I (Snow White), which was recently (spring 2014) previewed as part of the Prospectif Cinema programme at the Centre Pompidou. It is a film which, along with several sculptures and installations, translates into disturbing artistic language Beer’s investigation of the tools traditionally used for identifying what people often seek to define as real. By playing around with the notions of presence and absence and interrogating the physical properties of everyday objects, Oliver Beer throws doubt on the objectivity of perception. The objects – a pipe, a firearm, railway lines –, which are ordinary and yet mysterious, seem to be possessed of a biographical dimension, partly explicable through the propensity of the human mind to invest inanimate objects and to enrich what Heidegger termed their ‘being-in-the-world’ through the imagination. The particular way in which they are related to the wall or the floor, which they gradually merge into, brings added richness to the potential narrative, all of which contributes to an eventual infinite regress of the magic power of those two notes capable of summoning up the Prince of Darkness.

This exhibition, which marks the beginning of the new season, comes in a year that has been particularly full for this young British artist (b. UK, 1985), whose work is devoted to forms of perception, particularly in relation to acoustic phenomena. During 2014, Oliver Beer worked with the Palais de Tokyo in their Hors-les-Murs cycle at the MoMA PS1, with the Villa Arson in Nice, and also with the Musée d’art contemporain in Lyon for the exhibition Rabbit Hole, which continues until 17 August 2014.

Opening on Sunday 7 September 2014, from 2pm to 6pm

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Gilbert & George
SCAPEGOAT PICTURES

Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac is delighted to announce the upcoming Gilbert & George exhibition, SCAPEGOAT. BOUC ÉMISSAIRE. SÜNDENBOCK. PICTURES FOR PARIS, in the Paris-Pantin venue.

Over the decades, Gilbert & George have observed the evolution of their East London neighbourhood and our modern world, dealing with the perpetual flux of urban life. In these pictures, the figures are acting in a way, which recalls how Gilbert & George saw themselves as ‘Living sculptures’, binding societal problematics and art together with a deadly serious way of describing a world of intense emotion, past, present and future.

These new pictures, all from 2013, reveal a modern western world through Gilbert & George’s sociological environment by exploring the tensions generated by the coexistence and the interaction of its inhabitants. The pictures are populated by young people from different races and backgrounds, veil-clad Muslim women, and Gilbert & George themselves, masked in some or covered in small bomb-like canisters of nitrous oxide in other pictures, adopting different guises, sometimes appearing as shattered forms. They describe, as they have always done throughout their artistic practice, our modern urban world, by tackling subjects – death, hope, life, fear, sex, money, race and religion – in an engaging and direct way.

Specifically conceived for the halls of Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac Paris-Pantin, the exhibition will create a tremendous environment before travelling to several museums. A book accompanies the exhibition, inlcuding a comprehensive essay by the novelist and cultural critic Michael Bracewell.

Gilbert, born in the Italian Dolomites in 1943, and George, born in Devon, England in 1942, both art students, meet in 1967 at St Martin’s School of Art in London (now Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design). At the end-of-year-show, the Snow Show, Gilbert and George created their first art as a joint effort, far removed from the formalist criteria of the art taught. In 1969, they created their first “Singing and Living sculptures”, making themselves both subjects and objects of their works in a perfect fusion of their art and their everyday life. Gilbert & George then start to appear as “Living sculptures” in museums and galleries. In 1970, during a renowned presentation, they sang and moved along Flanagan & Allen’s song Underneath the Arches for hours. The pictures dating from 1971 are the first grid-arrangements, which would henceforth become their formal signature. In 1980, their iconography becomes more complex containing endless levels of meanings from symbolic and allegorical to the most unbridled eroticism, to the religious, political and personal.

Gilbert & George have created together as an artist for over 40 years and have created more than 2000 artworks.

In 1980, the Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven put together their first retrospective exhibition showing their pictures of 1971-80. In 1985, the Guggenheim Museum, New York staged a retrospective exhibition. In 1990 and 1993, Gilbert & George had the ground-breaking exhibition in Russia and China. In 1997, the Musée d’art moderne, Paris hosted a major retrospective exhibition of their art. In 2005, Gilbert & George represented Great Britain at the Venice Biennial. The Tate Modern in London organised an extensive survey of Gilbert & George’s art in 2007, which travelled to Munich, Turin and then to the United States. They have received many awards including Honorary Professor of Philosophy by London Metropolitan University.

Currently, there is an important exhibition at the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco running until 2 November 2014.

Press Conference: Friday 5 September 2014 from 10am

Opening in the artists’ presence Sunday 7 September from 2pm to 6pm

Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac Paris Pantin
69, avenue Général Leclerc - 93500 Pantin
Tuesday – Saturday, 10am to 7pm

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