calendario eventi  :: 

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8/9/2004

Two exhibitions

White Cube, London

Damián Ortega
Spirit and Matter
10.09.04 - 18.10.04

Inside the White Cube is pleased to present the first solo British exhibition of work by Damián Ortega, a project to be experienced in both Inside the White Cube and Hoxton Square.

Ortega (born 1967) lives and works in Mexico City. He began his career as a political cartoonist and his art has the intellectual rigour, critical edge and profound sense of playfulness often associated with his previous occupation. He creates sculptures, installations, videos and actions inspired by a wide range of mundane objects from golf balls and pick-axes to bricks and rubbish bins, even tortillas, all subjected to what has been described as Ortega's characteristically 'mischievous process of transformation and dysfunction'. In Cosmic Thing (2002), his most celebrated work to date first shown at the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania and later at the Venice Biennale (2003), Ortega dis-assembled a VW Beetle and re-composed it piece by piece, suspended from wire in mid-air in the manner of a mechanic's instruction manual. The result was both a diagram and a fragmented object and offered a new way of seeing the 'people's car' first developed in Nazi Germany but now produced in his native Mexico.

For Inside the White Cube Ortega will construct a work outside in Hoxton Square through which the viewer can walk, but whose meaning can only be grasped once upstairs in the otherwise empty gallery. Playing with the idea of optical and physical illusion, the piece will fluctuate between object, image, sign and space.

Damián Ortega was artist in residence and had a solo show at the Museo Serralves, Porto in 2001 and had a solo exhibition at the ICA Philadelphia in 2002. He has also been included in several international group exhibitions at the MCA Chicago, Casa Barragán, Mexico City, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York and Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki. Ortega also participated in the 50 th Venice Biennale in 2003 and will create the concluding project in Tate Modern's inaugural contemporary 'Untitled' series in April 2005.

Inside the White Cube is open from Tuesday to Saturday, 10am – 6pm. For further information please contact Sophie Greig or Sara Macdonald on 020 7930 5373.

Opening Thursday 9 September 6-8pm
Inside the White Cube, 48 Hoxton Square, London N1 6PB

Image: a work by Damián Ortega
_________

Doris Salcedo
Neither
10.09.04 - 18.10.04

White Cube is pleased to present Neither a new, large-scale work by Colombian artist Doris Salcedo. Salcedo has made a charged and discrete installation, a complete re-working of the building's interior walls.

On closer inspection, it is clear that there are new 'walls' inside the gallery, which have been marked and textured by wire fencing that is pressed at various levels into their dry surface. The physical effect is one of disturbing ambiguity between something welcoming (the safe haven of four walls) and something imposing, operating in the space between notions of architectural protection and spatial demarcation.

Making spatial coordinates unfamiliar is a function of most of Salcedo's work; an artist who is known for her poetic sculptures that often incorporate domestic wooden furniture such as chairs, chests, wardrobes or beds to make felt a sense of tragedy or profound emotional unease. These works lay evidence to lives that have been erased as if the living, breathing forms that once used the furniture have been submerged within their own support structure. In 2002, Salcedo made an epic work entitled Noviembre 6 y 7 , a commemoration of the 17 th anniversary of the violent seizing of the supreme court in Bogotá on the 6 th and 7 th of November, 1985. Salcedo sited the work in the new Palace of Justice, where over the course of 48 hours (the duration of the battle) wooden chairs were slowly lowered over the façade of the building. The work functioned as “an act of memory”, a way of inhabiting the space of forgetting.

In 2003, for the 8 th Istanbul Biennale, Salcedo made a large-scale installation that consisted of 1,600 wooden chairs stacked together in the space between two buildings on a busy, commercial side street in the centre of the city. The chairs were stacked at varying angles yet they created a mass with a completely flat surface. The space occupied by this installation became both saturated and empty; the flatness of the surface lent emphasis to the details. For Salcedo, the work was a topography of war, motivated by historical events in Turkey.

Salcedo's work could point to a kind of mental archaeology since all of her materials are charged with significance and transfused with the meanings that they have accumulated in everyday life. Neither has a choreographed tension that is experienced slowly, through the viewer's visual appraisal of its rich surface detail. Salcedo's work is, in part, influenced by her readings of philosophy (in particular, the writings of Emmanuel Levinas) and literature (especially the poetry of Paul Celan), as well as by the 'social' sculpture of Joseph Beuys. Neither also refers in part to an opera by American avant-garde composer Morton Feldman from 1977, which incorporates a libretto written by Samuel Beckett, whose sparse, nihilistic poetry conveys the weight of human existence. On a symbolic level, Neither is paradoxical since it renders its materials reliant on each other while at the same time, resting them of their function. Devoid of objects, its subject is the gallery space itself, removed and re-created to constitute what Salcedo has described as an “image of emptiness, a lack and opacity”.

Doris Salcedo has exhibited internationally, most recently at 8 th Istanbul Biennale (2003), Documenta XI (2002) and XXIV Bienal de São Paulo (1998). She has had numerous solo exhibitions including New Museum for Contemporary Art, New York (1998), Tate Gallery, London (1999), SF MOMA (1999) and Camden Arts Centre, London (2001). She lives and works in Bogotá, Colombia.

Opening Thursday 9 September 6-8pm
White Cube, 48 Hoxton Square, London N1 6PB

A colour catalogue will be available at the close of the exhibition.
Doris Salcedo will be giving a talk at the ICA on Friday 10 September, 7pm

Tickets: £8, £7 Conc, £6 ICA Members

Booking: 020 7930 3647

White Cube is open from Tuesday to Saturday, 10am – 6pm. For further information please contact Sophie Greig or Sara Macdonald on 020 7930 5373.

White Cube, 48 Hoxton Square, London N1 6PB

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