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26/11/2014

Bertrand Lavier / Andreas Christen

Massimo De Carlo, London

Bertrand Lavier
Lièvre A La Royale/Walt Disney

Massimo De Carlo is proud to present Lièvre A La Royale/Walt Disney the first exhibition of the French artist Bertrand Lavier in its London gallery.

Bertrand Lavier’s practice makes key use of irony and humour: the artist is on a constant, light-hearted, investigation of art itself. The analysis of the medium and of the gesture is explored among the relationship between the pictorial element and object-hood.

The artist calls his bodies of works chantiers (worksites in French), meaning that they are in constant evolution. The questions that are raised through his works adapt every time to a new context: what is relevant here is the process rather than the answer itself. The title Lièvre A La Royale references in fact to the most complicated and long recipe to cook hare. As put by the artist: ‘it is the best way to cook and eat hare. Making a piece of work for me is similar to cooking hare: long, complicated but wonderful in the end’.

Lièvre A La Royale/Walt Disney showcases a selection of works, made specifically for this exhibition, that are part of two of the artist’s most iconic chantiers: the Walt Disney productions and the Mirror Paintings.

Bertrand Lavier started creating the Walt Disney series in 1984. He was inspired by a comic strip that appeared in 1977 in which Mickey Mouse and his spouse Minnie visit a museum of modern art. The artist was so fascinated by the clichéd paintings that appeared in the comic, which Walt Disney had created in order to mimic modernist paintings, which he decided to photograph them and reproduce them in life size. In these colourful canvases the artist plays with the mediums of photography and painting: hiding beneath what appears to be a hand made painting is a meticulous and semi-industrial process that uses different materials and techniques such as ink-jet printing on canvas and silk screening. Here the artist transports the fictitious and whimsical world of Walt Disney into the gallery space, redefining the borders between fiction and reality, thought and action, gesture and medium.

The medium the artist focuses on in the Mirror Paintings series is that of the brushstroke. Here Bertrand Lavier covers three mirrors with silver brushstrokes, questioning the significance of the gesture and the medium itself in a contemporary context whilst at the same time reflecting upon how it was used by artists he admired such as Vincent Van Gogh and Roy Lichtenstein. The Mirror Paintings are uncannily puzzling for the viewer: through the use of the brushstroke the artist blurs out our reflection, allowing him once again to mock normality by transporting us into an unreal and imaginary dimension.

What you see in the work of Lavier is never what it appears to be at first glance: every piece hides in its apparent simple de-codification a series of layers that testify the industrious conceptual and crafting process that is behind each work.

Bertrand Lavier was born in Châtillon-sur-Seine in France in 1949. He Lives and works in Aignay-le-Duc and in Paris. Bertrand Lavier has had solo exhibitions in prominent institutions such as the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris, FR; Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain, Geneva, CH; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, CA, USA; Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Castello di Rivoli, Turin. Group exhibitions include: The Illusion of Light, Palazzo Grassi, Francois Pinault Foundation, Venice (2014); Disparitions réciproques, FRAC Poitou-Charentes, Angoulême (2013); Lyon Biennial, Lyon (2000); Venice Biennale, Venice (1997) and Documenta, Kassel (1982). His work is collected by prestigious institution such as the Foundation Louis Vuitton in Paris and the Collection Lambert in Avignon.

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Andreas Christen
Works 1959 - 2005

Massimo De Carlo Gallery is proud to present first solo show in London of Andreas Christen.
Works 1959 - 2005 is an exhibition that covers the entire career of the artist: spanning from his first paintings made in the late 1950’s to the last paintings made in 2005. The exhibition is structured as a voyage into the depths of the artist’s obsessive research for the perfect balance between canvas, light, object and space. As if he would be painting with light instead of colour to create a new space, Christen commented on his oeuvre: “My works are the equipment with which to discuss space.” These modern bas-reliefs play with the significance of the notions of absence and presence of light.

Andreas Christen’s signature white monochromes have served this purpose by opening up dialogues on the interpretation of light and spatiality through the three dimensional canvas. Here the notion of object-hood is merged into the canvas through the artist’s usage of the colour white: the pictorial character combined with the shape of the painting itself creates a series of optical games of lights and shadows that heighten the mysterious nature of these works.

The works get more experimental as the decades pass, moving from formed polyester in Monoform (1959/60), to epoxy in Komplementär-Struktur (1974) and finally finding MDF plates the most adequate material to freely experiment with in his later works (Untitled, 2002). His diverse bodies of work reveal the perfectionist nature of Christen’s activity by illustrating his constant and meticoulous interpretation of spatiality: the subtle dynamism of the canvases appearing to question the viewer on the relation between our human existence, space and time.

Although there is a minimalist resonance in his work, and he was a friend of Donald Judd, he never considered himself to be part of a minimalist movement. Also the term optical would be a hard attribute to attach to his work. In fact is probably more suitable to look for links to Christen’s work in foreign early constructivist works such as Lygia Clark’s Contra Relevos or Francoise Morellets Trames from the 1950s. It is surprising to look back into art history and realise the first Monoforms done by Andreas Christen in 1959 were made in the same year of when Fontana did his first concetto spaziale: all this well before Elsworth Kelley even thought of doing his first shaped canvas Yellow Piece in 1966.

Andreas Christen was both an artist and a successful designer, although he liked to keep the two practices separate, they seem to meet on a common ground of aesthetic and conceptual themes where the art merges with the craft. Perhaps because of this dualism of art and design, Christen has always steered clear of labels, and this may have contributed to the creation of an independent and coherent body of work that whilst investigating time and space also temporarily erases them: the shaped forms shift between yesterday and tomorrow, their abstract nature creates an uncertainty in the viewer that never ceases to be contemporary.

Andreas Christen was born in Bubendorf, near Basel, in 1936. He died in Zurich in 2006. Solo exhibitions include: Kunsthalleim Kulturhaus Palazzo, Liestal, CH, (2000); Andrea Christen: Werke - (Euvres 1958 - 1993), Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Winterthur, CH, (1995); Espace Fonds Régional d’Arrt Contemporain de Bourbougne, Dijon, FR, (1995);Bottrop-Josef Albers Museum, Bottrop, GR, (1994). Selected group shows: Example Switzerland, Kunstmuseum, Vaduz, Liechtenstein ( 2012); Neue Tendenzen: Eine europäische Künstler-bewegung 1961-1973, Museum für Konkrete Kunst, Ingolstadt, GR, (2007); Prague Biennale, Karlín Hall, Praha, CZ, (2005); Dimension Schweiz 1915-1993: Von der frühen Moderne zur Kunst der Gegenwart, Museion, Museum für Moderne Kunst, Bozen, IT, (1993).

Image: Bertrand Lavier

THURSDAY NOVEMBER 27TH, 2014 OPENING RECEPTION FROM 6:00PM TO 8:00PM

Massimo De Carlo, London
55 South Audley Street, London W1K 2QH
Tue/Sat: 10.00am - 6.00pm

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