calendario eventi  :: 

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28/2/2008

Two exhibitions

White Cube, London

White Cube Hoxton Square is pleased to announce its first exhibition with Mario Garcia Torres. Garcia Torres is known for work with a playful - and sometimes nostalgic - take on the history of Conceptual art, unlocking many of its forgotten narratives to bring forth new ideas and meanings. Through his interventions, slide projections, films and installations, Garcia Torres rethinks the history of contemporary art in a personal way to create what has been called an 'aesthetics of information'. The exhibition will feature two works: 'What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Stronger', a slide installation, and 'My Westphalia Days', a 16mm film.

'What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Stronger' combines text and photographs to create a kind of visual essay about Martin Kippenberger's attempts to establish a modern art museum on the Greek island of Syros. The form is characteristic of the artist: acting as a cultural archaeologist, he digs up a piece of the recent past to create a discursive portrait - half travel log, half proposal - of one of the more quixotic episodes in the history of contemporary art. 'My Westphalia Days' is a short film based on a few lost days in the history of an icon of contemporary sculpture. The Conceptual artist Michael Asher has presented, as an artwork, a commonplace caravan at Sculpture Project Munster since its inception in 1977. Last year, on 21 July, the caravan disappeared, only to be discovered four days later at the edge of a forest in the outskirts of the city. Garcia Torres has proposed a fiction about these missing days, filming a 30-year-old Mercedes Benz stealing a caravan almost identical to the one used by Asher from the site where it disappeared. The result is an open-ended, fragmentary road movie that follows the meandering path of the caravan as the car pulls it through busy streets, open autobahns and quiet, rural roads before it is abandoned amidst the forests and farmlands of Westphalia.

White Cube and Mario Garcia Torres will also publish a limited edition CD based on the artist's long-term project called 'I Promise ...', a work that monitors his daily practice as an artist. Whenever Garcia Torres stays at a hotel, he writes, on hotel stationery, a variation on this note: 'I promise to do my best as an artist, at least for the next [period of time]'. In a recent collaboration with musician Mario Lopez Landa, he recorded a song called 'I Promise Every Time', which will be released as a CD in an edition of 500.

Mario Garcia Torres was born in 1975 in Monclova, Mexico and is based in Los Angeles, California. He has exhibited in many group and solo exhibitions, including the Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna (2008), Kadist Art Foundation, Paris (2007), Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2007), Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt (2007), Venice Biennale (2007), Musée d´Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (2004, 2005 and 2007), MCA Chicago (2007), Tate Modern, London (2007) and the Moscow Biennale (2007). He was the recipient of the Cartier Award at the Frieze Art Fair (2007).

Inside the White Cube Hoxton Square is pleased to present an exhibition of new work by Kris Martin, which will be the artist's first with the gallery. Martin is known for work that explores, with subtle and elegant gestures, our sense of time and immateriality.

In a recent interview, Martin remarked that he considers 'every single piece as an invitation for the viewer to reflect'. This statement reveals the extent to which the artist asks the viewer to participate in creating the meaning and function of his work. His objects and interventions provoke a state of mind - an occasion to consider a situation or predicament - as much as they create a visual experience. At the Frieze Art Fair in 2007, for instance, Martin orchestrated an intervention amid the hubbub of the opening reception. Without prior warning, a woman's voice came over the loudspeakers and asked fairgoers to observe 'one minute of silence for no reason. For nobody. For nothing. Just one minute for yourself.' The work removed the viewers from the everyday activity of looking at and dealing in art, and allowed them to enter a new, seemingly free mental space of pure contemplation. The work itself is a kind of absence that demanded a heightened level of vigilance to the present moment and one's immediate surroundings. Other works take the form of a kind of riddle. 100 Years (2004) looks like an inert metal ball, but is - according to the artist - a bomb set to explode in 2104. The work sets off a number of questions about the value of objects invested with ideas by an artist, the sincerity of those ideas, and the transience of the artistic gesture.

For his exhibition at White Cube Hoxton Square, Martin will present a sound installation called What's the Time? Two speakers, barely visible in the almost empty gallery, will carry on a ceaseless, repetitive conversation. In addition to the sound piece, Martin will exhibit fragments of Flemish porcelain mounted and framed like priceless relics, a series that he calls 'Pars Pro'. These insignificant chips of porcelain depict scenes - such as a lady and a swan or a segment of landscape - that are broken from their original context to create echoes of a lost world.

Kris Martin was born in 1972 and is based in Ghent, Belgium. Solo shows include Marc Foxx, Los Angeles (2008), P.S.1, MoMA, New York (2007), Sies + Höke Galerie, Düsseldorf (2007) and Johann König, Berlin (2006). Group shows include Traces du sacré, Centre Pompidou, Paris (2008), Passengers, Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art, San Francisco (2007), 'Learn to Read', Tate Modern, London (2007) and 'Of Mice and Men: 4th Berlin Biennial for Contemporary Art' (2006).

Preview Thursday 28 February 2008, 6-8pm

Image: Mario Garcia Torres

White Cube
48 Hoxton Square - London
Open Tuesday to Saturday, 10am to 6pm.
Free admission

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