Double Eye Poke
dal 26/5/2015 al 24/7/2015
Segnalato da
26/5/2015
Double Eye Poke
Galerie Kamel Mennour, Paris
The exhibition brings together phenomenon-works based on the human figure, at times manifest, at others somewhat secret, embodied in time and space.
Curated by: Béatrice Gross
Kamel Mennour is pleased to announce Double Eye Poke, a new exhibition dedicated to four major US artists: Lynda Benglis (born 1941), Dan Flavin (1933–96), Sol LeWitt (1928–2007), and Bruce Nauman (born 1941).
Freely adapted from a work of Nauman's—where the violent visual attack evoked in the expression ''better than a poke in the eye'' is represented literally and mischievously one-upped—the title of the exhibition offers an exploration (cruelty excluded) of different modalities, generally qualified as minimal, post-minimal, or conceptual, all of which are the result of a shared interest in a certain troubling of vision.
Double Eye Poke brings together phenomenon-works based on the human figure—at times manifest, at others somewhat secret—embodied in time and space. This figure, often fragmented, sometimes even completely abstracted, takes on various forms: from the human face, at once raw material and object of symbolic representation, as with Benglis's objectifying caresses; to the full body as place and tool of the trial and pleasure of repetition, as with Nauman's amateur choreography, bordering on the absurd; to the traces and physical prints left by the artist-creator (or the "art worker" in his service), as with the irregular random geometry of LeWitt; to the peers (Donald Judd) and tutelary figures in the history of art (Vladimir Tatlin) who inspire Flavin's evanescent structures…
Now a disenchanted statement (doesn't one of Nauman's neon signs also say, none sing?), now a ghostly apparition (don't LeWitt's instructions end up in one enormous, apparently chaotic scribble?), Double Eye Poke offers a challenge to the being of perception and thought. A challenge in which sensational works reveal themselves to be essentially critical, where the language (and its games) that constitutes them underlines even as it translates the necessity of discovering the invisible at the heart of the visible. Language also specifically qualifies that which was thought to have been outrun: not ''paintings'' but rather wall drawings, image-objects, or ceramics. The pictorial reappears right where it was no longer expected. To borrow Hal Foster's phrase, "What you see is never quite what you see."
Image: Invitation
Press Contact:
Marie-Sophie Eiché ,Jessy Mansuy-Leydier,
Milic and Emma-Charlotte Gobry-Laurencin, by phone: +33 1 56 24 03 63 or by e-
mail: galerie@kamelmennour.com
Opening: Wednesday 27 May 2015
Galerie Kamel Mennour
47 rue Saint-André des arts
and 6 rue du Pont de Lodi
75006 Paris
Hours: Tuesday–Saturday 11am–7pm