calendario eventi  :: 

X

18/11/2004

Two events

Contemporary Art Centre, Malaga

Brain Box Dream Box

Until 20 February

Brain Box Dream Box is the first solo exhibition by Paul McCarthy (born Salt Lake City, USA, 1945) in Spain. The show is an overview of the work of this artist that includes installations, videos and sculptures from the last ten years. These works enter into an intense dialogue with complete selection of about 200 drawings from 1967 to the present day. This exhibition has been organised with the collaboration of Hotel AC M‡laga Palacio.

Paul McCarthy's work only became known to a wider public relatively late. This is attributable in part to its ephemeral origins in performance art in the 1970s, and in part to McCarthy's precisely staged, provocative defiance of certain taboos. Using exaggeration and satire, the artist flouts social conventions. He draws on a blatantly heightened vocabulary of sex and violence that lays bare before us the strata of our subconscious and a culture of consumption and entertainment that has long since ceased to be either appealing or innocent.

Brain Box Dream Box looks at a highly influential Postmodern Iuvre and at the same time sheds light on the intuitive and conceptual aspects of Paul McCarthy's art. The drawings openly reveal his thought processes and working methods, while the three-dimensional works elicit a physical response from the viewer. Reason and feelings are not mutually exclusive in McCarthy's work Ð indeed they provide us with a comprehensive instrumentarium by which we may recognise our world.

The exhibition is completed with a selection of videos by Paul McCarthy, to be shown in different sessions open to the public and free of charge.

Humour and irreverence

Humorous, ironic and irreverent, McCarthy's work first came to attention in the 1970s with a series of performances and videos largely on the subject of human degradation, mutilation, perversion and scatological matters. From the mid-1980s he devoted himself consistently to sculpture, with a recent emphasis on large-scale inflatable works, such as the example exhibited outside the Tate Gallery in London last year.

In his work, McCarthy frequently uses an idiom and iconography drawn from North American consumer culture, from Disneyland to Hollywood as dream factory. His approach to these subjects, however, offers a new perspective, transforming these environments into disturbing and grotesque scenarios which draw our attention to the de-humanisation and brutality underlying the West's apparent social equilibrium.

This exhibition has been organized in collaboration with the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven/The Netherlands and has been curated by Eva Meyer-Hermann.

_____________________________

Tableau

Until 23 February

Tableau refers to tableaux vivants, or 'living pictures', a custom dating back to ancient times and one that spread until the beginnings of the last century. As occurs in these hybrid representations, lying somewhere between the theatrical and the pictorial, Jane Simpson has created a setting in CAC M‡laga in which immobile and frozen objects exhale restrained life and emotion.

In the exhibition, Jane Simpson explores the relationship between objects and memory, a concept that on occasions is deliberately confused with nostalgia. In this sense and within the artist's exploration of the world of her materials, ice is revealed as a highly eloquent element about the passing of time and possesses, like the work of Simpson, contradictory traits: vulnerable and destructive, delicate and resistant, ephemeral and impenetrable.

Ice covers the hanging chandelier, the tables titled Ice Table (1996-2004) and Ice Storm (2003), the sculpture Tivoli (2004) and it is the main subject of the group of photographs called In Between (freezing and melting) lies passion 1-6 (2004)

Contradictions and Still Lifes

Simpson's obsession with the expressive and sensory abilities of her materials is expressed in the exhibition by the work entitled Virgin Queen (2004), a very comfortable luxurious Chesterfield sofa on which, however, it is forbidden to sit. The voluptuousness and impregnability of the object contrast with the sobriety of the Tivoli cement, a type of lovers' bench on which one is allowed to sit, although with the inconvenience of a refrigerated backrest covered in frost.

Finally, another highlight of the exhibition is a set of shelves upon which Jane Simpson has created, using a wide range of materials, a series of still lifes inspired by the work of the Italian painter Giorgio Morandi. On each of the shelves, the artist has placed, in the style of a family portrait, a series of objects evoking and claiming the full importance of all that is intimate, domestic and close.

Young British Artist

Jane Simpson's work first became known in the now-celebrated exhibition Sensation in the early 1990s which brought together the work of the so-called YBA's (Young British Artists). However, in contrast to the work of her fellow artists, Simpson's art has avoided controversy and immediate effect to focus, as she explains, on humble and at first sight worthless objects.

For this reason her work focuses on objects from the domestic realm such as tables, chairs, lamps and pictures, treated as relics to evoke the person who used them. As Simpson says: 'when I go to junk markets I always ask myself how things ended up there. These are things from people's lives. They may simply have been thrown away, but there might also have been more tragic reasons. What I am really dealing with is nostalgia'.

Contemporary Art Centre
Calle Alemania s/n Malaga

stampa

permanent link