calendario eventi  :: 

X

25/1/2010

line up

Carre' d'Art Musee d'art contemporain, Nimes

Michael Raedecker and Isa Melsheimer, whether referring directly to ordinary social life or to visions drawn from the great history of painting, deal with the image, and to do this they use an offbeat medium: embroidery, more generally read as testimony to popular culture. In so doing, they also question the share of beauty, or even affectation that the artwork is supposed to bring with it.
Born in Holland in 1963 and since based in London, Michael Raedecker in his painting revisits the traditional genres of still life, landscape and flowers. The highly fluid treatment of the paint, in grey monochromes, with their wool and thread add-ons, points to an exhausted, melancholy kind of figuration in which the theme of the ruin and wear marks abound, in contrast with the often provocative titles. These very free stitches structure the surface of the works like the drips and touches. Through his household subjects taken from old catalogues, magazines and films, Raedecker queries the validity of painting for dealing with the everyday in our contemporary period outside of already encoded images picked out on the Internet. This exhibition bringing together a score of works from the last five years will be this artist’s debut show in France.
The Raedecker exhibition is being organised jointly with the Camden Arts Centre, London and the Gemeentemuseum, The Hague.

For Isa Melsheimer, embroidery is also a medium for drawing and writing. Her exhibition is designed as a specific installation in the Norman Foster building for which she is producing new embroidered hangings carrying quotations from The Box Man, a novel by the Japanese writer Kobo Abe. It will also be focussing on a selection of older works, around 24, dating from 2002 to 2009, which also express this idea of a different, hidden space, from which come gazes that we are not aware of and which observe us. With a keen interest in architecture, Melsheimer develops a line of thought around the living space as identified by modernist architecture and as encountered on a day-to-day basis in the home, as well as shopping malls and the halfway places used by the homeless. Some recent works created after press images taken during the collapse of the Archives of the City of Cologne or other news events will be treating the subjects of instability and disappearance in our tightly organised western world. This theme also refers back to the artist’s great interest in issues to do with the environment and collective responsibility.
Each of the artists will be occupying one wing of the upper floor.

Isa MELSHEIMER Catalogue, bilingual French/English with an essay by Camille Morineau. Book printed with Analogues, maison d’édition pour l’art contemporain.
Michael RAEDECKER Catalogue, two versions, French or English, with an essay by Dominic van den Boogerd and a conversation of the artist with Laura Hoptman.

Press contact for this exhibition: Delphine Verrières - Carré d'Art Tel: +33 (0)4 66763570 - Fax: +33 (0)4 66763585 - E-mail : communication@carreartmusee.com

Carré d'Art - Musée d'art contemporain
Place de la Maison Carrée. 30000 Nîmes. France
open daily except Mondays from 10 to 18.00
Admission : € 5, reduced rate: € 3.70.

stampa

permanent link