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18/11/2009

David Maljkovic / John Baldessari / Cyprien Gaillard

Spruth Magers, Berlin

David Maljkovic

Sprüth Magers Berlin is delighted to present two installations by Croatian artist David Maljkovic. The artist’s practice engages with the heritage of modern utopias, both in its theoretical and practical manifestations. His films, drawings, sculptures and installations often evolve around the potential of monuments and pavilions built during a period of optimism in former Yugoslavia in the 1960s and 1970s that have now been neglected or forgotten. Maljkovic resuscitates such former memorials by turning them into sites for alternative activities, often carried out by members of his own generation.

Evolving around two films and a series of collages the exhibition focuses on two architectural installations, confronting the viewer with a seemingly forgotten or invisible ‘heritage’- one that is not presently perceived as valuable or legitimate. In ‘Images With Their Own Shadows’ (2008), Maljkovic is concerned to convey a spirit of missed opportunities and resigned optimism within an alternative narrative of Yugoslavia’s postwar cultural movements. The work places a number of cool, hip and detached-looking youths in a vaguely futuristic environment, alternating with long shots of geometric mobile sculptures made of a greyish metal.

The film is set at the estate of Croatian artist, architect and EXAT-51 founding member Vjenceslav Richter, and uses audio footage from a final interview with him. EXAT 51 short for Experimental Atelier was a group of artists, designers and architects active from 1951 1965. In the context of the social realism that dominated the cultural landscape of post-war Yugoslavia, the group announced their own particular vision of progress, collectivity, experimentation and freedom of expression, and articulated singular stances on subjects ranging from the synthesis of all artistic forms, and the importance of social and cultural conditions in artistic production. The collective played a crucial role in the contested narrative of socialist Modernism in the former Yugoslavia.

The second film ‘Retired Form’ (2008) was shot in Memorial Park, a commemorative space for the victims of the Second World War in Dotrscina, Zagreb. The park is organized around a monument by artist Vojin Bakic, which was inaugurated in 1968, and yet which was neglected and devastated during the 1990s. Bakic's work occupies a central position in the art of the former Yugoslavia; during the Cold War, abstraction in art provided the arena for quite different ideologies and their interpretations yet Bakic's work rejected such simplifications by employing abstraction inside the social art system. Maljkovic’s related collage on aluminum, ‘Retired Form’, (2009) displaces a silver obelisk that was once designed as a public monument, and relocates it into a field of a historically uncharged space. Though ‘retired forms’ such as these may not have fulfilled their utopian promises, Majlkovic envisions an alternate history for them, as monuments to eras not yet come to pass. As the artist says, ‘I consider the tired place also to be an oasis, a place of potential pause’.

Majlkovic ́s work is not concerned with nostalgia as such, but rather possibilities of looking into the past to reassess its potential for the present. Like an archaeologist, he explores the aftermath, the disruption and continuity with the socialist project of modernity, insofar as this heritage is realizing itself in and through our imagination. In relation to the historical, political and cultural contexts in which Maljkovic ́s work comes about, it mirrors the categorical transformation of understandings of East and West, of communism and capitalism.

Born in 1973 in Rijeka, Croatia, Maljkovic currently lives and works in Zagreb. Recent solo exhibitions include P.S. 1, New York; Whitechapel Gallery, London; Kunstverein Hamburg; CAPC, Bordeaux; and Kunstverein Nürnberg. Recent group exhibitions include ‘11th Istanbul Biennale’, Istanbul, ‘Eyes Wide Open’, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam and the 5th Berlin Biennial for Contemporary Art in 2008.

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John Baldessari - Hands And/Or Feet (Part Two)’

Sprüth Magers Berlin is delighted to present ‘Hands And/Or Feet (Part Two)’, an exhibition of new work by American artist John Baldessari. Widely considered one of the most influential artists of the last forty years and one of the founding fathers of conceptual art, Baldessari has with this new exhibition both returned to his characteristic strategy of utilising and embellishing found visual material and extended his interest in the physical form and social meaning of particular parts of the human body.

Each of the ten large-scale works is composed as a diptych of found photographs or media images including hands and/or feet. The instructive and amusing contrasts between the images are then reworked with the artist’s typically vivid and witty tactic of over-painting and colouring-in particular elements of the images. Such multipart and multicoloured works have been a prominent feature of the artist’s practice for two decades, and are rooted in Baldessari’s intense fascination with language and image, and their relationship with one another. For Baldessari, sequences of images, like sequences of letters or words, confer narrative and communicate meaning.

Exploring the processes behind the dynamics of creative expression and human understanding is the essential enquiry which animates the serious play at work in Baldessari’s art. Baldessari has said that he is ‘more interested in things that have escaped attention’, a statement which points to how and why the selected colouration and cropping of pre-existing visual material occurs as it does. For Baldessari, colours and shapes as well as images are codes, signifiers which inform how visual experiences are ‘read’, and what meanings can be derived from such experiences. Much of Baldessari’s work has involved creatively and insistently exploring how mixing together different kinds of communication pictorial, verbal, chromatic, physical create differing modes of comprehension.

A recurrent motif in Baldessari’s art has been the obscuring of whole faces, which are commonly regarded as the aesthetic repository of human identity, and instead focussing on isolated bodily features sometimes ears and noses or arms and legs, in this case hands and feet. This practice untaps and exploits the comic visual potential of the appendages and extremities of the human form, and probes the range of social associations and meanings they carry. The emphasis and interest on extremities is further heightened by the three-dimensionality of the works in ‘Hands And/Or Feet (Part Two)’, as they are in relief, an effect which also blends and blurs generic boundaries between photography, painting and sculpture. Why we look at things the way we do and derive particular understandings from certain visual situations is an important question that Baldessari’s art asks, and these new works pose these questions anew with a distinctive vibrancy and insight.

John Baldessari, born 1931 in National City, California, lives and works in Santa Monica, California. He studied at San Diego State College; U.C. Berkeley; UCLA; the Otis Art Institute and the Chouinard Art Institute. Baldessari has received honorary degrees from the National University of Ireland; San Diego State University; the Otis Art Institute and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2004. His awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship (1986); the Oskar Kokoschka Prize, Austria (1996); the Governor's Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Visual Arts, California (1997); the Spectrum-International Award for Photography of the Foundation of Lower Saxony, Germany (1999) and the BACA International Award (2008). His work has been exhibited in the 47th (1997) and 53rd (2009) Venice Biennial; the Carnegie International (1985-86); the Whitney Biennial (1983) as well as Documenta V (1972) and VII (1982).

In 2005 the artist had a retrospective in two parts at the Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien (‘Works 1962-1984’) and the Kunsthaus Graz (‘Works 1984-2005’). Recent exhibitions include a presentation at Kunstmuseum Krefeld, Museum Haus Lange (2009) and a major retrospective at Tate Modern in London which opened in October 2009 and will travel to MACBA, Barcelona; LACMA, Los Angeles and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York through 2011. Also in October 2009 Baldessari presented his first ever tableau vivant, ‘Ear Sofa; Nose Sconces with Flowers (In Stage Setting)’ at Sprüth Magers London. In June 2009 John Baldessari was awarded the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the 53rd Venice Biennale.

John Baldessari – Filmsreening and Artist Talk Friday Nov 20, 2009, 7 pm

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Cyprien Gaillard

Sprüth Magers Berlin is delighted to present an exhibition by French-born, Berlin-based artist Cyprien Gaillard evolving around his work ‘Cities of Gold and Mirrors’ (2009). This 16mm film develops the artist’s interest in contemporary landscapes as complex sites of loss and potential, manifested through architecture, monuments and history. ‘Cities of Gold and Mirrors’ takes place principally in and around the Mexican city of Cancún, and consists of a sequence of five parts accompanied by a particular looped recording of ‘Le Feu de St. Elme’, by Haïm Saban and Shuki Levy (1982). The city of Cancún, founded in 1970, offers Gaillard a landscape perpetuated by a spirit of anachronism and ruin. As hedonistic young American tourists, the ‘spring breakers’ returning to the US with little but addled recollections, invoke a contemporary discourse of decadence and decay, so the modern hotels built of steel and glass upon the physical ruins of the mighty Mayan Empire articulate an historicized vision. Within the film's non-narrative structure, a spirit of displacement presides; the city is a palimpsest, and time and space are displaced in the moment of the spectacle and the delirium of the carnival.

Cyprien Gaillard works across a range of media, including film, video, photography, sculpture and live performance. Between vandalism and minimal aesthetics, romanticism and Land Art his practice oscillates between a resistance to the notion of archaeology as fixed or passive, and a suspension or relocation of time and place. His recent works has been concerned with deconstruction of post-War modernist architecture, and the demise of Utopian ideals on which such structures were founded.

The artist’s archeological approach towards found imagery, nature and architecture, can be observed in his series of works ‘Geographical Analogies’ and ‘Fields of Rest’: both juxtapose a sequences of polaroids taken in various locations to each other. They draw analogies based on collective memory, for instance between natural sites in Mexico or Egypt, or Second World War bunker architecture on the coastline of Normandie and housing projects in the Bronx whether it be for their visual correspondences or their geological placement, highlighting in each photo the same sense of fragility and liberating it from its original connotations.

Cyprien Gaillard (born 1980 in Paris) has recently had solo exhibitions include Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel, Stroom Den Haag, The Hague, FRAC Champagne-Ardenne, Reims (2009), Hayward Gallery Project Space, London (2008), Centre International d’Art et du Paysage, île de Vassivière, L’Atelier du Jeu de Paume, Paris (2007). Recent group exhibitions include the Berlin Biennial (2008) and Younger than Jesus, New Museum, New York (2009). Forthcoming solo exhibitions include, The Wexner Center for the Arts, Ohio and a two person exhibition at The Hirshhorn Museum, Washington DC, USA (2010). Sprüth Magers Berlin will also be concurrently hosting exhibitions by John Baldessari and David Maljkovic.

Image: David Maljkovic

For further information, images and interviews please contact Jan Salewski
js@spruethmagers.com

Private View: 19 november 2009, 6-9pm

Monika Spruth Philomene Magers
Oranienburger Str, Berlin
Opening Hours: Tue Sat, 11am 6pm
free admission

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