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9/9/2010

Richard Artschwager / Elad Lassry

Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis

Richard Artschwager
Hair

curated by Anthony Huberman

The Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis is proud to present an exhibition of works by the widely acclaimed American artist Richard Artschwager, in the first focused look at the artist’s exploration of rubberized horsehair.

A maverick who began his career as a cabinet-maker, Artschwager has influenced countless other artists with a wide-ranging body of work that includes sculptures, paintings, prints, photographs, installations, drawings, and furniture pieces that merge the machine-made with the hand-made.

Over the past four decades, Artschwager’s work has been variously described as Pop Art, because of its derivation from utilitarian objects and incorporation of commercial and industrial materials; as Minimal Art, because of its geometric forms and solid presence; and as Conceptual Art, because of its cool and cerebral detachment. But none of these classifications adequately define the aims of an artist who specializes in the relationship between perception and deception.

Artschwager’s exhibition at the Contemporary focuses on a material he has used throughout his career: rubberized horsehair. Emerging from the artist’s famous blps series he began in 1968, the hair works depart from the crisp lines and sharp forms of his better-known Formica furniture works, and blur the clarity of sculptural form, throwing objecthood out of focus. As the artist puts it, “Hair is peculiar. It’s foreign to gravity yet at the same time it has stability. You can cut it and it has built- in contrary qualities, which are structure and chaos.”

Used most commonly in upholstery, rubberized horsehair is usually hidden from view underneath the rounded edges of chairs and couches. In these works, Artschwager turns the objects inside out, exposing their innards and applying them to new surfaces. The artist has long been interested in what he calls object-pictures, collapsing the flatness of an image with the tactility of an object, or, in his own words, “sculpture for the eye and painting for the touch.”

Installed in the Contemporary’s central main gallery, silhouettes of life-size human figures seem to dance and float weightlessly on the wall. Often beginning as small scribbles in the artist’s notebook, the organic forms are enlarged to life-size and made with actual horsehair, allowing their sketch-like quality to outlast their entrance into the world of objects. As illusions, the images confuse the real with the artificial, and while his figures dance, climb, dive, and rejoice as “living” characters, their materials prevent the image from staying within our reach.

Also included in the exhibition are images that have made up Artschwager’s iconography for over forty years: hair-covered blps, exclamation marks, corners, and hair-covered furniture pieces each become sculptures that are slightly out of focus. In contrast to a contemporary art conversation weighed down by irony, strategy, and cool self-reflexivity, Artschwager’s new exhibition at the Contemporary foregrounds the artist’s sincere celebration of the experiential knowledge of objects and pictures and his patient passion for locating the body and soul of an image.

Richard Artschwager was born in 1923 in Washington D.C and currently lives and works in Hudson, NY. He first studied chemistry, biology, and mathematics at Cornell University. In the early 1950s, he became involved in cabinet-making, producing simple pieces of furniture. His work has been the subject of many important surveys, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin; and Kunstmuseum Winterthur and is included in many museum collections worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Art Institute of Chicago, Museum Ludwig Cologne, and Fondation Cartier, Paris.

Richard Artschwager: Hair is organized by the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis.

General support for the Contemporary’s exhibitions program is provided by Jeanne and Rex Sinquefield; William E. Weiss Foundation; and Nancy Reynolds and Dwyer Brown. General operating support is provided by Whitaker Foundation; Bank of America Charitable Foundation; Missouri Arts Council, a state agency; Regional Arts Commission; Arts and Education Council; and members of the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis.

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Elad Lassry
Sum of Limited Views

The Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis is pleased to present a new exhibition by Tel Aviv-born, Los Angeles-based artist Elad Lassry. Featuring recent and new works, this exhibition will be the artist’s first major museum monograph in the United States.

Lassry’s intimately framed photographs slip effortlessly between genres and iconographies, capturing plastic still-lives, uncanny publicity portraits, collages, animals, and landscapes. Thoroughly familiar and blank at the same time, his images move beyond the simple category of “photography” and instead ask us to revisit the perceptual experience of a picture.

Duplicating and then cloistering his subjects within saturated fields of color, excised from their original context, Lassry attends to the singularity of his subjects, while also immersing them in their own formal properties. While clearly depicting specific objects, people, animals, or places, the images are overwhelmed by their own colors, shapes, and patterns, effectively merging their representation with their abstraction.

Lassry’s photographs often slide between stillness and movement—challenging the eye to register, in certain blinks, fleeting vibrations in the picture. Whether through layered exposures (reminiscent of early techniques in “ghost photography”) or the staccato rhythm of colors, and between field and ground, his still-lives and portraits possess a seductive, if slippery, hold on our vision. Ever suspicious of the status of photography, Lassry also paints his frames with richly saturated hues, camouflaging his images and flirting with the nature of the monochrome, and the photograph’s own status as an object.

Sum of Limited Views spotlights the artist’s recent explorations, including several new works, with a focus on Lassry’s capacity to create the “unstill” picture. Also featured in the exhibition will be a survey of his 16mm films, which, like his photographs, blur the experience of the still and moving image. Presented in a black-box gallery, reversing the conditions of the photographic experience, Lassry’s films flex the strain between realism, narrative, and abstraction. Combining over thirty photographs with his 16mm films, Sum of Limited Views presents an overview of an artist’s exploration in making pictures.

Elad Lassry was born in 1977 in Tel Aviv, and he lives and works in Los Angeles. He has presented work throughout the U.S. and Europe, including a recent monographic survey at Kunsthalle Zürich and an exhibition of three films at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Other exhibitions include the Art Institute of Chicago; the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami; Rubell Family Collection, Miami; Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; New Museum, New York; Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach; and Gallery 400, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago. Lassry presented his photographs in The Front Room at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis in 2008.

Elad Lassry: Sum of Limited Views is curated by Anthony Huberman and Laura Fried and organized by the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis.

Image: Climbing Boy, 1998-99. Acrylic, rubberized hair and masonite, 59 x 48 x 2.5 inches. © Richard Artschwager. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery.

Press contact: Lisa Grove 314-535-0770 x206 lgrove@camstl.org

OPENING WEEKEND PROGRAMMING
Opening Night Reception: Friday, September 10, 2010, 7:00 – 9:00 pm
Artists Talk: Saturday, September 11, 2010, 1:00 pm

Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis
3750 Washington Blvd. St. Louis, Mo, 63108
Hours: Wed-Sat 10am - 5pm
Sun 11am - 4pm
Closed Mon-Tues

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