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24/11/2011

Nick Oberthaler / Robert Mapplethorpe

Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac - Marais, Paris

Robert Mapplethorpe

Following collaborations with Robert Wilson and Hedi Slimane, Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac has invited Sofia Coppola to curate a new Robert Mapplethorpe exhibition.

This exhibition uses the same approach as the show “Robert Mapplethorpe: Eye to Eye”, which was curated by American artist Cindy Sherman in New York in 2003, and “Robert Mapplethorpe Curated by David Hockney”, which was presented in London in 2005. The idea is to have a contemporary artist bring his or her take on an œuvre as significant as that of Robert Mapplethorpe’s.

Celebrated American director Sofia Coppola selected the images from The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation in New York—with whom the gallery has collaborated for this exhibition. By using rarely seen and little-known images taken by Mapplethorpe, Coppola has created an installation very much in step with her world. Always inspired by images, the director uses photographs to orient the visual concept of her films. She draws inspiration from images pulled from magazines, taken by iconic photographers, and even snapped with her own camera. Whether done consciously or not, from a single glimpse of the photographic ensemble, the viewer could easily imagine the photos to be a mood board for a future film. However, there is no “narrative” that weaves the selection of images together: the viewer has the freedom to invent fictional characters within the nuances of gray.

Sofia Coppola extracted gentle images from Robert Mapplethorpe’s archive: contemplative moments from which a delicate tension emerges. Known for his erotic and provocative images and the metaphysical nature he often imbues his subject matters with, the viewer is able to discover a nearly-unexplored side of the artist. Mapplethorpe’s portraits of children are taken with an intense gaze: Honey (1976), Andes (1979). He photographs animals languidly sprawled out: Muffin (1981), Kitten (1983). His portraits of charismatic women seize the intimacy of introspective moments: Annabelle’s Mother (1978), Paloma Picasso (1980). Mapplethorpe is also famous for his still life photographs of flowers. All of these stock-still people and things, replete with grace and candour, are presented through the gaze of a creative woman: Coppola’s innate sense of beauty is something she has in common with Robert Mapplethorpe.
She knows how to emphasize, in the silence of suspended moments, the tenderness and emotion present in the artist’s work.

Sofia Coppola’s selection includes four loans from prestigious museums: Katherine Cebrian (1980) and Waves (1980) are part of the permanent collection of London’s Tate Modern, Melia Marden (1983) is part of the Guggenheim collection and Fireplace with Flowers (1986) belongs to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.

Robert Mapplethorpe was born in 1946 in Floral Park, NY and died in 1989. He took his first photographs using a Polaroid camera. Among snapshots of still lifes and other subjects, many of his early polaroids are self-portraits and portraits of close companions, such as singer/artist/poet Patti Smith. Some of his early work includes unique presentations of his photographs, displayed in self-created frames that morph his photography into sculptural objects. Mapplethorpe later acquired a Hasselblad camera and photographed his circle of friends and acquaintances, notably artists, composers, socialites, porn film stars and members of the underground S&M scene. Certain photographs are considered shocking to some, due to the explicitness of their content, but they are also extremely elegant in terms of technical mastery. At the beginning of the 1980s, Mapplethorpe began to photograph very classical images: sculptural nudes of men and women, still life floral scenes, and formal portraits of artists and celebrities.

Sofia Coppola was born in 1971 in New York. She is a film director, screenwriter, and producer. After studying fine art at the California Institute of the Arts, she directed her first film, The Virgin Suicides in 1999. She received an Academy Award and three Golden Globe Awards for her 2003 film, Lost in Translation. Her 2006 film Marie Antoinette, shot on location in Versailles, received an Academy Award for Best Costume Design. Coppola’s most recent film, Somewhere (2010) received the Golden Lion of the 67th Venice Film Festival.
Sofia Coppola lives between New York and Paris with her husband, Thomas Mars and their two daughters.

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Nick Oberthaler
Zweifel und Gnade (Doubt and Grace)

Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac is delighted to announce its first exhibition with Austrian artist Nick Oberthaler. This show will bring together a selection of the artist’s recent works in the Drawing Space.

Nick Oberthaler is a draftsman who uses intriguing techniques. Though he likes to refer to his works as ‘drawings’, he also works with paint and ink, which he further combines with pasted-on fragments. He remains partial to paper as his “canvas”, due to its fragile quality. The marks that he makes on it are unalterable. The paper is sometimes damaged, and he likes to treat it roughly.

Paper is a delicate surface that also enables the artist to create very understated pieces. He works with a variety of materials like ink and wax, pastel and gouache or watercolor, which create unpredictable effects and a tension on the paper’s surface.

In his compositions, Nick Oberthaler uses numerous media: photographs, photocopies of images found in books, magazines or on the internet… Untitled (vertical horizon/after Philip de Koninck) (2011) is a small drawing in ink and pastel. The materials are visibly superimposed one atop another; large brush strokes frame the center, which is occupied by a postcard glued on its flip side. One recognizes the famously nebulous skies, characteristic of landscapes by De Koninck, which the artist partially concealed using a thick black stripe. The spatial aspects of the drawings are constructed in relation to a perspective whose vanishing point, within this postcard, appears like a window on an off-center horizon.

Nick Oberthaler likes to combine his drawings. He assembles or juxtaposes them in the installations, which he considers to be veritable laboratories. Sometimes he puts up walls of plywood, as if he is trying to shift the walls of the atelier within the exhibition, in order to preserve what is intuitive and spontaneous. He likes to meddle with the fixed picture rails of the museum or gallery. All the way down to the measurements, he navigates between strict form and incomplete form.

The images that inspired him are sometimes pasted nearby, or pasted on the drawings themselves. Untitled (is painting a construction?) (2011) is a geometric assemblage of stretches of color, in nuances of gray, although the neat contours bring to mind the structure of an abstract geometric painting. The rigor of this construction seems deliberately disrupted by the hastily glued-on pictures. Nick Oberthaler leaves behind stains, mistakes; he adds pasted-on papers to this framework, which create a mise en abime of his geometric formulations.

The finishings are uneven: either very final or very sketchy. He wants to continually maintain the mystery of the associations that he chooses, and the uncertainty about what he truly wishes to reveal. He insists on the ambiguity of images, letting the viewer’s gaze wander and decide which point of reference to focus on within the œuvre.

The exhibition title, “Doubt and Grace”, refers to these two states that often affect the artist. Oberthaler takes a lot of time to combine his materials and his images: everything may change at the very last minute, and one never knows if a drawing is truly complete when it is exhibited.

The artist also presents wall-mounted sculptures in this exhibition. His drawings are juxtaposed with metallic structures shaped like crosses. This module plots a geometry from the wall that then extends the drawing's limits within the space. It is not simply a backdrop: the artist shapes our perception by directing our eye to a meeting point. It is a metaphor of the mirror, in which a favorite image is slipped into the corner. In these sculptures, we may also see an imaginary landscape, presented on the panes of a window whose contours have been erased: a nostalgic vision of a state we do not wish to forget.

Oberthaler likes to think of his work as something metaphysical; he explores the states of melancholy, nostalgia, and contemplation. He draws the way he would write poetry.

Nick Oberthaler was born in 1981 in Bad Ischl, Austria. He lives and works in Brussels where he is currently doing a residency at the WIELS Center for Contemporary Art. Oberthaler graduated from the Akademie der bildenden Künste in Vienna and the Ecole Supérieure des beaux-arts in Geneva.

He has participated in a number of group shows in Europe. Since 2008, he is co-editor of the monthly magazine Blackpages.

A book will be published on the occasion of this exhibition with essays by art critic Joanna Fiduccia and Gallien Déjean, independent art critic and curator.

Image: Robert Mapplethorpe, Honey, 1976, Silver print, 40 x 50 cm (16 x 20 in).

Opening: Friday, November 25th from 6:30pm to 8:30pm, in the artist’s presence.

Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac
7, rue Debelleyme Paris
Hours: tue-sat 10am-7pm
Free admission

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