calendario eventi  :: 

X

31/5/2008

Two exhibitions

Galerie Eva Presenhuber (old location), Zurich

Doug Aitken
99¢ dreams

With '99¢ dreams', Galerie Eva Presenhuber is happy to present it’s third solo exhibition with new work by Doug Aitken. Ever since the L.A. based artist was awarded the International Prize nine years ago at the Venice Biennale, he has been touted as one of the most innovative video artists of our time. His exploits spark a recurring buzz. The last time was for SLEEPWALKERS, a multiple projection on the outdoor façade of the Museum of Modern Art in New York that included a remarkable array of stars (among others, Donald Sutherland and Tilda Swinton).

Recalling the aesthetics of video clips, Doug Aitken’s works could be identified as multimedia soundtracks underlining our restless life in a globalized and media-infused world. He has always understood how to develop innovative presentation forms for his breathtakingly beautiful picture material: in his room-filling multiple projections, a linear storyline is fragmented in favor of a visual and acoustic simultaneity. Rapid cuts rhythmize the picture flow. Aitken works with sensory overload, strong soundtracks and spectacular imagery to intensify the viewer's experience.

In his one-man show at Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Doug Aitken for the first time presents an installation that, instead of moving pictures, is composed exclusively of still images. The work is for the most part based on unpublished material that has accumulated over the years. A total of more than two hundred pictures hang on all four walls of the Zurich gallery room. They show situations you can find anywhere in the world: artificial light sources, service stations and, again and again, scenes in airports. Highways, escalators, riverbanks, a skyline full of satellite dishes and aerials. An old woman’s dreamy gaze, a human silhouette against the light of the setting sun. A pair of eyes, a house on a rain-drenched beach, the belly of a pregnant woman, a deserted children’s playground and, several times, the sea and the shore. The theme that links all together is a yearning undertone. Aitken shows moments of mere magic snatched out of every day life’s temporal flux.

In their subtext the melancholic mood of the photos transmits a personal, even an almost intimate ambience. Most of the people, however, have their backs turned to us. Perhaps in 99¢ DREAMS, Doug Aitken is telling storys from his own life, but the work is in no way autobiographical: opposite his photos we recognize our lives, ourselves. The captions indicate the very diverse locations of each of the pictures. Thus the way they are hung next to each other levels geographic differences just as much as it levels the boundaries between the individuals. The arrangement in the gallery room follows a gradual increase in brightness. The shift from darkness, via artificial light and twilight, to bright daylight is perforce the greatest constant.

For further information, please contact Gregor Staiger at the gallery.

----

Ugo Rondinone
twelve sunsets, twenty nine dawns, all in one.

Galerie Eva Presenhuber is pleased to present new work series' by Ugo Rondinone in a solo exhibition titled 'twelve sunsets, twenty nine dawns, all in one.'. Five years have passed since Rondinone’s last one-man show at Eva Presenhuber’s. In the meantime, the artist has created a lot of buzz. Unforgettable were his appearances with Urs Fischer in the church of San Stae during the 52nd Biennale in Venice and at THE THIRD MIND, a group show curated by the artist himself at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris.

At the center of Ugo Rondinone’s exhibition at Eva Presenhuber’s is a new motif: the Scholar Rocks. These are stones that natural erosion has riddled with holes, stones that in traditional China are admired and collected. They are used as ornaments in landscaped gardens or even arranged inside a study as a contemplative focus. This second function has given them a name with a whiff of quiet mysticism. Rondinone has assigned the Scholar Rocks a similar function to the casts he did of ancient olive trees, among other places, at last year’s installation in San Stae for the Venice Biennale. In correspondence, the Scholar Rocks are also casts: they originally stem from Chinas Tai Lake region and were scanned in and so enlarged in reproduction that they form an over-man-sized group. Covered with grey cement, these sculptures are not nature, but signs of a condensed temporality. They exceed human dimensions and allude to a yearning for spirituality.

In a contrapuntal relationship to this, so to speak, is the concept of a day’s work that has run through Ugo Rondinine’s oeuvre from the beginning: there are landscape pictures, circle and stripe paintings and, new, small sculptures which all stand for the time the artist spent on one activity on one specific day. As was the case with its predecessors, the new series, DIARY OF CLOUDS, assumes a structure that comes about without any intention, but is form for form’s sake. The small sculptures, originally worked in clay, indeed recall figures in the sky, but quite obviously do not depict anything concrete. Cast and produced within a wooden shelf, they are formulas for a self-referentiality that is in fact absolute.

A further work group is made up of paintings primed with gesso, hung in a horizontal line through all three exhibition spaces. They show markedly insignificant and eventless motifs such as house façades or interiors devoid of people. On its reverse side, each picture is collaged with a page from the New York Times that appeared on the day it was painted. Like the sculptures from the series the DIARY OF CLOUDS, the small paintings carry the date written out in the title. As ever, Rondinone’s work is determined by a melancholic dispositive. This artistic cosmos that he has been constructing over nearly two decades is comparatively static. New signs of longing are added, but do not supersede the old and already existing ones. The fact that the Scholar Rocks (which have become the source material for his newest work group) have stood for years in the artist’s apartment, may be a revealing indication of the way he works, but any other meaning cannot be drawn: the artistic cosmos that Rondinone has constructed, evolves not within the real but in reclusion and contemplation.

For further information, please contact Judith Platte at the gallery.

Image: Doug Aitken

Opening: Sunday June, 1, 11am – 9pm

Galerie Eva Presenhuber
Limmatstr. 270, P.O. Box 1517, CH-8031 Zurich
Opening hours: Tuesday - Friday 12 noon - 6 pm
Saturday 11 am - 5 pm

stampa

permanent link