calendario eventi  :: 

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17/2/2011

Two exhibitions

Malmo Konsthall, Malmo

WALEAD BESHTY – A diagram of forces

This exhibition of the Los Angeles-based artist Walead Beshty (b. London, 1976) brings together works from the past ten years in a site-specific installation designed for Malmö Konsthall.

Walead Beshty’s works remind us how important it is to appreciate the transitory nature of daily life, especially its gaps, its pauses, and its moments of in-betweenness. This in-between time has always been central to Walead Beshty’s work. In his early works the theme of ‘in-betweenness’ is literally represented in the sites he chose to photograph. His Excursionist Views (2001–2005) show failed, depopulated modernist housing developments that sit precariously between evacuation and demolition, Island Flora (2005) documents the plants, weeds, and vegetation contained within isolated highway medians that, left to their own devices, have grown unruly, while the series of photographs of abandoned shopping malls, titled American Passages (2001–ongoing), present the mercantile and capitalistic nightmare of empty, closed shops.

These three projects all confront the urban landscape as a problem of ‘in-betweenness,’ depicting locations trapped in a state of geographic and temporal limbo, neither fully abandoned, nor actively integrated into the urban context. More recently, this engagement with the in-between has grown into a means of production, making use of such mundane procedures as air travel or sending a package, activities that usually recede into the background of an artist’s productive life.

In tandem, Beshty explores various issues associated with photographic representation, specifically that of transparency, and the resulting works both revisit and complicate early modernist practices. While homages to influential figures such as László Moholy-Nagy can be found in his Pictures Made by My Hand with the Assistance of Light (2006)—which were based on an apocryphal story of a missing body of Moholy-Nagy’s work—these references appear in more subtle ways in works such as Dust (2009) (2010), or Six Color Loop (CMYRGB: Irvine, California, July 16th 2008, Fuji Crystal Archive Type C) (2009). Beshty’s photograms attempt to demystify photography and mine the gaps in its historical narrative; the paper and its folds serve both as an expression of photographic materiality and as an exploration of photography’s technological development.

Transparency—how a work is produced and by whom—is also vital for Beshty, and since 2005 his works reveal their productive processes both in their form and in their titles. In Travel Pictures (2006/2008) he discovered how he could work productively with issues of chance within the production of photographs. After realizing how his unexposed film was affected by passing it through the high-powered X-ray machines at the airport, Beshty began to use travel as part of his work. What at first seemed to be simply discolored damage left on his film (a side effect of the Xray machines) developed into an ongoing multifaceted body of work in which the situations surrounding the work—the production or shipment of the artwork and the travel an artist engages in—were directly manifest, pushing his investigation of transparency into new territories. These ideas extend to the sculptural works included in the exhibition, such as his Fed Ex works which are titled according to their travel from exhibition to exhibition, for example 20-inch Copper (FedEx® Large Kraft Box ©2005 FEDEX 330508), International Priority, Los Angeles–Tijuana trk# 865282058011 October 28–30, 2008, International Priority, Tijuana–Los Angeles trk# 867279774929 January 2–6, 2009, International Priority, Los Angeles–London trk# 867279774881 January 14–16, 2009 (2008–), and the copper table tops designed for the Malmö Konsthall which oxidize as they are used by the staff and public of the institution.

The current exhibition is an extension of Beshty’s approach. Using the intersections between the three overlapping grid systems present in the floor plan of the Malmö Konsthall, Beshty designed an exhibition that has both a physical and conceptual experience of “in-betweenness” evidenced in the sharp angles, abrupt turns, and off-kilter placements of the walls.

In each of these instances, the artwork is inextricable from the incidental circumstances of its making (be it time, travel, or light) and the conditions under which it is viewed, presenting a transitory vision of the work of art. From his early inquiries into the problem of photographic transparency, the means of production and how the work enters the world has become a chief concern. Whether it be in sculptural, photographic, or architectonic form, Beshty’s work maintains a commitment to the political and material condition of aesthetics even as it uses art to re-imagine the world around us.

In addition, a new 160pp overview of his work published in conjunction with JRP/Ringier will be available, along with a limited edition of the book and poster for the exhibition.

The exhibition is produced in collaboration with CA2M, Madrid.

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REDISCOVERED PHOTOGRAPHY OF LÁSZLÓ MOHOLY-NAGY
Photographs, Photograms, Photoplastics, and Films

László Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946) is now considered one of the classic modern artists. He worked in many different techniques and media, such as painting, photography, sculpture, film, graphics and set design. Everything he did was based on his burning interest in the visual. In many ways he was a child of his times – the new, modern world that was starting to take shape at the beginning of the 20th century. In the inter-war period, society was characterised by a strong belief in the future and a fascination with the life of the new urban environment, with its hectic pulse, technology and industry. Malmö Konsthall’s exhibition of the works of László Moholy-Nagy presents and showcases his photographic images, films and graphic works.

Moholy-Nagy was born and grew up in Hungary, where he began to study law. At the outbreak of World War I he enlisted in the Austro-Hungarian army, and it was during the war that his interest in art was aroused. He began to draw. Once back in civilian life, it was not long before he gave up law in favour of art.

When he was 24, Moholy-Nagy emigrated to Germany after a short stay in Vienna. In his abstract paintings he explored the relationships between light, colour and form. His primary inspiration came from the Russian avant-garde: Constructivism and the Suprematists Malevich and Lissitzky. During the period 1923-28 Moholy-Nagy taught at the renowned Bauhaus School led by Walter Gropius. At that time the Bauhaus motto was “Art and Technology – a new unity" and the school was permeated by Gropius’s vision of the artist as a designer of mass-produced art. Together with Gropius, Moholy-Nagy designed and edited the series of Bauhaus books, a total of 14 books that functioned as the school’s manifesto.

It was during the 1920s that Moholy-Nagy began to be interested in photography as a form of technology. He was fascinated by being able to paint with light, and how technique – not the artist – creates the image. Moholy-Nagy was one of the first artists to experiment with photograms – images created without a camera by placing objects between a sheet of light-sensitive paper and a light source. These – his abstract shadow images – originated in well-known everyday objects.

He also worked with photomontage, in which he cut contemporary images out of magazines and newspapers and then combined them to form a new picture. Often he both drew and painted within these montages, and then photographed them – uniting the components forever into an image that can be reproduced from a negative. He called these photomontages “photoplastics”* to emphasise that it is the light that shapes the image.

Moholy-Nagy also used the new portable miniature camera to explore how photography – through its ability to record forms – can change and renew our perception of the everyday. Lines, patterns and shapes dominate his black-and-white photographs of the world and make us perceive reality afresh. He liked to use unusual camera angles – often taking the pictures from a bird’s or a worm’s eye view – as well as shadows and negative photos – in which the photographic negative is itself presented as the photograph.

Film was a medium that suited Moholy-Nagy because it could give life and movement to the photographic image. This dynamic, which mirrored the new, modern urban life, was exactly what he sought in many of his images. He made a number of documentary films between 1930 and 1946. The exhibition presents several of his avant-garde films.

The political situation in Germany forced Moholy-Nagy to move to Amsterdam in 1934, then to London in 1935 and two years later he emigrated to Chicago, USA. There he helped to found the new Bauhaus School. The school was closed shortly afterwards. In 1939 he opened his own school, the School of Design in Chicago, which subsequently became the Institute of Design and now forms part of the Illinois Institute of Technology. László Moholy-Nagy died of leukemia in 1946 at the young age of 51.

The works in this exhibition were chosen by Daniel Hug, László Moholy-Nagy’s grandson, in consultation with Malmö Konsthall. The exhibition includes a series of unpublished photographs from the artist’s travels through Sweden and Finland in 1931, as well as other photographic works that have never been shown before.

Public relations officer
Lena Leeb-Lundberg +46 40-34 12 94 lena.leeb@malmo.se

Image: Walead Beshty

Opening Friday February 18, 5-9 p.m.
Director Jacob Fabricius introduces the exhibitions at 7.30 p.m.

Malmo Konsthall
St Johannesgatan, 7 Malmo
Opening hours Daily 11-17
Wednesdays 11-21
Closed: Midsummers eve, Midsummers day,
24/12, 25/12, 31/12 and during installation.
Admission free

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