calendario eventi  :: 

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17/10/2007

Two exhibitions

Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac - Marais, Paris

Richard Deacon

Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac is pleased to announce the upcoming exhibition of British sculptor, Richard Deacon on Thursday, October 18th through November 17th. The artist will show new works in wood and ceramic - as well as a monumental stainless steel sculpture entitled Another Mountain.

Known for an imaginative and sometimes unexpected use of materials, Deacon has been surprising us with sculptures of supreme beauty and controlled structure for many years. It is often the tension between these two aspects, the unusual, perhaps organic, shape with a surface skin that is both of the work and alien to it, that makes Deacon's art so striking. His uncanny way of seeing an object in space is particular and this position often asks more questions than it answers.

With Another Mountain, Deacon continues the exploration of large standing forms, that he began last year with a permanent commission for the Echigo Tsumari Art Triennial in Japan. By taking tubular steel sections, rounding the ends, and then creating a three-dimensional web structure, we see both a playful and serious exploration of space pulled open in unsuspected ways by these sausage shaped elements. The thoughtful method of seeing how three tips can find a way to balance together forming a join, the simple structure of four on the ground forming the base upon which it all hangs together, the asymmetry of each section of sculpture working against one another, seeming to pull it one way and then back the other: this is the magic of a Deacon sculpture. There is a dialogue between how is stands, and how it wants to fall over, but doesn't. As you look around and through it, the hand of an artist that loves materials for what he can make them do, and how splendid he can make them look, is evident.

The skin of the work is a varied medley of different surface treatments created with soft grinding. As the light changes it moves from seeming like snake skin, to water in the sunlight, to the matted down feathers of a duck's back, and these elements, with the almost clumsy stance of the work, create a whole range of emotions and tonalities.

Richard Deacon represented Wales this year at the Venice Biennale and recently presented an important wooden sculpture, The Garden, at the Louvre in the "Counterpoint III" exhibition last spring. He is currentlly on the faculty of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. The artist lives and works in London, dividing his time between Paris, London and Cologne.

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Bernhard Martin

Nonvillages et Ouvillages

Francis Picabia, in the early 1940s, was the first person to incorporate trivial magazine images on a large scale in his pictorial compositions, thus making him the spiritual father of a whole generation of artists brought up in the 1980s who reacted to the media's visual bombardment by collecting and combining these images in an intensive and original manner. Within this context, Bernhard Martin has created a new form of radicalism, associating every conceivable plastic universe and overlapping them in interactions reminiscent of the Surrealist tradition. Their components, however, remain clearly defined, separated from one another by strong outlines. Bernhard Martin's pictures are as a reflection of the interfaces of contemporary computer graphic software. The hybrid nature of his characters, landscapes and objects is accentuated yet further by his stylistic heterogeneity, employing photographic realism alongside more abstract forms of bodily expression, as well as two-dimensional areas executed with an airbrush.

Every choice made by the artist might, however, have well been different. Bernhard Martin is a chronicler of everyday life. His use of objects, sometimes utterly infantile, never spontaneous but rather carefully thought through, characterises his approach. He himself sums up his method in the following way: "Idea of interchangeability without notion of chance". With his vast collection of objects, which often resemble "objects ready to use but of ungainly purpose" (Vanessa J. Müller), he never denies traditional arthistorical classifications; landscapes, still-lives, genre scenes and portraits always remain identifiable. "What interest me are all those different worlds, those islands, those cabinets full of curios, those biotopes, those clashing contrasts; in short, daily life," says Bernhard Martin, describing the purpose contained within his work, a fascinating sub-system of real phenomena.

Drawing holds a very special place in Bernhard Martin's oeuvre. Unlike Alex Katz with his Paintings in Black and White (Carter Ratcliff), Bernhard Martin's drawings are not so much precise models for subsequent creations, but rather tangible traces of an elaborate process of invention, the echo of the stress of an "inspection" of the iconographic potential of a specific motif. Shapes and compositions are "tested" before being transformed into different formats, some monumental. His drawings cover a wide spectrum ranging from classical, entirely in graphite, to polychrome compositions with areas of collage and multicoloured acrylic, all displaying a precision resulting from the immense effort and concentration required to find the perfect form of expression for a plastic idea born of the observation of everyday life.

Bernhard Martin was born in Hanover in 1966, and studied at the Fine Art Academy in Cassel from 1983 to 1989. He now lives in Berlin. He first came to the attention of the public at large with his much talked about entry in the group exhibition of new German painting at the Frankfurt Kunstverein in 2003. His work is in several major collections including the Musée d’Art Contemporain in Geneva, the Kunsthalle in Mannheim, MoMA in New York and the Rubell Collection in Florida. Bernhard Martin has also had a number of important one-man shows, notably at the Villa Arson in Nice in 2004, and at the Arario Contemporary Art Museum in Seoul in 2006-7. In November 2008, Bernhard Martin is due to receive the prestigious Art Prize of the City of Wolfsburg, attributed, in recent years, to artists such as Jörg Herold, Katharina Fritsch, Olaf Nicolai and Thomas Schütte. Zdenek Felix, art-historian and former director of the Deichtorhallen in Hamburg, will give the presentation ceremony speech.

Image: Bernhard Martin

Opening October 18 from 7pm to 8:30 pm

Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac
rue Debelleyme, 7 Paris
Free admission

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