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20/11/2014

Three exhibitions

Galerie Eva Presenhuber , Zurich

Candida Höfer
Closer

Galerie Eva Presenhuber is delighted to announce the solo show of the German artist Candida Höfer. The exhibition includes a selection of large-format photographs of imposing interiors and parts of buildings, as well as a series of new pictures, some focusing on singular objects, others exhibiting an increasing tendency toward abstraction.

From 1973 to 1982 Candida Höfer attended the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. She first studied film under Ole John before transferring to the photography class of Bernd Becher in 1976 as one of his first students. In 1975 she had her first exhibition at gallery Konrad Fischer in Düsseldorf, where she presented a slide projection. Candida Höfer’s entry into the art world is thus closely associated with the city of Düsseldorf and her contacts from that time.

Geographical references are an immanent part of Candida Höfer’s extensive œuvre. For more than forty years the artist has photographed the interiors of actual buildings, most accessible to the public, rarely private ones as well, that are readily identifiable. Among them are museums, libraries, foyers, concert halls, bank archives, exhibition halls, stages, and train station waiting rooms. The geographical range and thus the socio-cultural connotations of her chosen motifs extends mainly across Europe and North America, and reaches in single instances to South America and Asia. Each work is precisely and simply titled with the name of the place or the institution in which the photographed space is found. The actual existence of these spaces is what matters, although Candida Höfer’s artistic interest is not in mere documentation. What does interest her is the differentiation of complex picture subjects, the issue of light, and how spaces and architecture influence people. Yet people are only rarely included in the photographs, generally categorically excluded. She explains: “Of course it interests me that these are spaces used by people, but I don’t have to show this by picturing them. I want to capture how the spaces change over time, how they change because of what is placed in them, and how the things interact with each other.” Candida Höfer’s pictures are extremely thoughtful compositions of subjects filled with an almost infinite variety of architectural and decorative details. Their desertion and “uncanny beauty” (Benjamin H. D. Buchloh) is somewhat disorienting, unsettling, and humbling.

The exhibition presents a series of photographs of various interiors, two of which were made in Düsseldorf. These are “Schmela Haus Düsseldorf | 2011”, the Nordrhein-Westfalen art collection, and the “New Stahlhof Düsseldorf | 2012”, renovated in 2002. Here she has focused on a stairwell, showing its impressive architecture. A symphony in white, created simply by the receding line of the banister.

In contrast to her earlier works, most of which were meant to show inherent relations of images, the new works more often concentrate on single objects, often in isolation and carefully staged. They explore the ontology of objects, colors, and light. For example, a neon tube in the dark interior of a stairwell becomes a form-giving entity, and dictates the minimal composition on the picture surface. In another work a thin white line runs across a concrete floor, and the photographic composition is thereby fragmented into two abstract sections. These new works often have English titles, but as in those of her earlier photographs they indicate nothing more but what there is to see. For example, the work just mentioned is simply titled “Line on the Floor 2014”.

In addition to the photographs, Candida Höfer is also presenting two new projections in the show, “Echoes” and “Roads”. Since the beginning of her artistic career she has again and again quite deliberately employed projections, which mediate between stasis and movement, between the haptic and the immaterial image. She describes the projections, as opposed to photography, as “a counterbalance to the weight that static wall pictures can assume in an exhibition. A projection prescribes the sequence of images—but can never completely dictate the viewer’s perception, for viewers can begin watching it or walk away from it at any point in the sequence. A book does the same. And there as well the author cannot control the sequence. That is up to the reader. In addition, a projection is comparable to the fleeting nature of our own seeing, but at the same time provides an opportunity to
pause for a moment. And that too is a quality of everyday seeing. However the images, if they are large and hang low, can only invite one to look. At least as a form of presentation they offer a way of looking that is not between merely a fleeting registration and pausing, but rather between a mere glance and close study, if the viewer’s patience permits it.”

Candida Höfer’s sensitivity to the inherent laws of the picture medium, as well as her conscious emphasis on aesthetic aspects of presentational forms, are once again ably presented in this exhibition.

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Alex Hubbard
Urethane Paintings

Galerie Eva Presenhuber is pleased to present the second solo show of American artist Alex Hubbard entitled Urethane Paintings.

Urethane Paintings is a presentation of 15 works created by casting traditional paintings and using casting materials on traditional stretchers. These cast and poured paintings become lenses through which the gallery space as well as the other paintings in the exhibition can be viewed. Simultaneously, they also act as film stills testament to their own creation.
The works vary from beer bottle brown amber to melted plastic purples and blacks. The paintings act as projections against the gallery white, as ushers between spaces, and as portholes to outside space.
Hubbard has long been an artist whose praxis intertwines the different roles of the artist, making films as a painter and paintings as a sculptor. It is in this new series that he manages to fully display his vision of space and architecture and forces us to enter this reflexion through a labyrinth of colours and textures, of light filtered through screens. Thus the paintings create their own space surrounding them. The stretchers are a mise en abyme of their own motifs when placed in front of windows which reproduce a similar structure.
In this new series of work, one cannot help but sensing Hubbard’s humour, as if he had decided to take on our popular vision of painting as a window into a world, a world of his own he has decided to create.
Alex Hubbard has had solo exhibitions at the Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, MA, USA 2014, at the Hammer Museum, CA, USA, 2012, Kunsthalle Berlin, DE, 2010, Centre for Contemporary Visual Art, Toronto/ON, Canada, 2010 and The Kitchen, New York/NY, USA.

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Justin Matherly, Oscar Murillo, David Ostrowski, Tobias Pils
Group Exhibitions

Galerie Eva Presenhuber is delighted to present the four international artists Justin Matherly, Oscar Murillo, David Ostrowski, and Tobias Pils in a group exhibition. The exhibition features new works that provide glimpses of the artists’ current artistic production.
The four artistic positions could not be more different, however the idea for the show and its realization were meant to explore the aesthetic of the dissimilar, contradictory, and different evoked by such variety. The point was to achieve identification by distinguishing between the exhibited positions, each of which is convincing thanks to its singular quality, its presence, and its individual expressive means. Any notion of coherence was thus permanently undermined, and replaced by one of reciprocal commentary.

Justin Matherly is known for his large-scale sculptures in cast concrete that refer allegorically to sculpture from Greek and Roman antiquity. Parts of crutches and walkers combine with shapes cast in concrete that curve around the metal like knots. Using soft materials Matherly creates a flexible mold, the cast of which is then reworked in a second step. This forces him to once again study the negative of the desired form. Without being shown what the original images might once have meant to represent, as viewers we see ourselves confronted with extremely compressed and degraded shapes, many of them as though limbs of amputated and beheaded bodies. The walkers mounted beneath them as permanent supports for the sculptures suggest the possibility of the deterioration of our own bodies, which are at the same time potentially liberated thanks to the mechanical aids. Matherly describes this ambivalence between freedom within the bondage and limitations of one’s own body as “perpetual motion.” “It all connects to metempsychosis, which is a Greek theory about the reincarnation of the soul after death. In my work, there’s a breakdown of forms into other forms—nothing ever really stops. The walkers can also help on a practical level by making the sculptures portable.”

At the age of ten Oscar Murillo moved with his family from La Paila, a small mountain village in Colombia, to East London. Years later he describes the move as an “astonishing cultural displacement.” Themes such as distance, displacement, and movement are pivotal in Murillo’s artistic practice and strategy. The manifestation of the body in transit and precise questioning of such issues as migration, trade, and globalization characterize his work—on the canvas, in his actions, in the studio, and beyond. As an artist, Murillo functions as a middleman between various demographics, and facilitates the encounter between two worlds that would not normally meet in the same way. “What’s interesting to me is how cultures collide—what’s important is functionality and for things to have the same standing,” he explains. “I am trying to obliterate hierarchies.” Despite his multidisciplinarity, painting can be seen to be his core concern. He frequently uses a broom handle instead of a brush, and generally lets a canvas lie on the floor for a month or two before it is stretched so that it gathers ‘information’, what the artist refers to as the ‘DNA of the studio’. Murillo’s paintings are thus filled with archival traces of past actions that are prominently recalled in words or numbers—“work,” “yoga,” “poker,” “corn,” “3”—or, as mentioned above, in the form of pieces of studio detritus—crumpled drawings, threads, adhesive pigment, copper, or dust.

David Ostrowski’s large-format works frequently strike us as daringly, almost provocatively empty. But to Ostrowski emptiness and nothingness are not merely abstract philosophical concepts, but rather a deliberately cultivated artistic gesture and strategy, as well as a complex way of grappling with material. “Ultimately I try to switch off this painterly knowledge. I enter the atelier and forget everything. I suppress pressure and ambition. I simply paint, and then the works happen somehow. And again and again I forget how I painted pictures before,” he assures us. In this way Ostrowski tests boundaries, and risks producing questionable pictures. His processes are only seemingly disoriented, however; the artist clearly cultivates methods by which he provokes coincidence and tempts the unexpected. This is above all manifested in the works of his “F” series—“F” standing for “failed.” David Ostrowski’s works are layerings of multiple paint and material planes that are collaged on the canvas, overpainted, and promptly torn off again. Occasionally they bear the traces of dirt and footprints. He is also interested in the immediacy and irrevocableness of the use spray paint, which he employs as an artistic intervention on the canvas. In this way pictures are produced that retain a high degree of uncertainty, are cheerfully hermetic in a grungy way, and virtually defy categorization.
What is interesting about Tobias Pils’ work is the mystery of confusion. In his large-format pictures we are confronted with ambiguous geometric shapes, grids, and structures that combine into configurations that leave objectivity only guessed at. Pils’ objective references elude positive legibility, they seem like dream fragments, snippets of memory, or realistic set pieces in which we think we can make out landscapes, figures, and objects. Then there’s the modulation of gray tones that create in the picture a mood that is neither gloomy nor cheerful. Pils’ gray, like his expressive shapes, constitutes an entity of its own, and stands in no direct relation to nature, but simply points to its own mutability. By evoking associations, allusions, and ephemeral coherencies, Pils’ works function as appropriate referents for the inscrutability and chaos of life. They are works that intentionally elude anything explicit and represent a permanent avoidance of superficial solutions. “I don’t believe in solutions,” the artist says, “that’s why I try to forget all pictures when starting a new one.”

Press Contact:
Maria Florut, m.florut@presenhuber.com

Opening: Friday, November 21, 6 to 8 pm

Galerie Eva Presenhuber
Maag-Areal, Zahnradstrasse 21, Zürich
Opening hour: Tue - Fri 10am - 6pm; Sat 11am - 5pm

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